The constitutionalisation of cities and the future of global society

ABSTRACT

The constitutionalisation of cities is analysed as a process through which urban residents operate as constitutionalising forces within their cities through lived experiences, practices and engagement, and cities try to impose themselves as constitutionalising forces within a rapidly transforming global society. This article explores the tensions generated by the constitutionalisation of cities. It focuses on identifying their character, assessing current economic and socio-cultural processes within cities and articulating a vision of the cityscape. Finally, it applies the idea of chronotopes, as developed in literary studies, to the study of cities. This multidisciplinary approach allows us to understand the constitutionalisation of cities, so far as they seek to break into a global society dominated by states and financial capital. It suggests a vision in which acts of urban citizenship may become emancipatory.

KEYWORDS:

• Cities
• constitution
• citizenship
• urban
• commons
• constitutionalisation

1. Introduction

Contemporary cities constitute major social, cultural and economic nodes within global society. While the political economy of global and globalised cities is generally well understood (see, among others, Smith 1996; Sassen 2005; Zukin 2010; Harvey 2012, 2019; Williams 2019), it remains much harder to offer a coherent analysis of how cities actually constitutionalise themselves within our multi-layered global society dominated by the usual suspects of states, corporations and their cross-border operations, and international organisations, as well as occasional rogues such as criminal networks, armed groups or unruly territories and polities. In this article, we want to paint a picture of the constitutionalisation of cities as a process based on the tension between the citizenry, which operates as a constitutionalising force within cities through lived experiences, practices and engagement and cities, which try to impose themselves – not only as city authorities but also as major spaces of human life on the planet – as constitutionalising forces within a rapidly transforming and highly unequal global society.

Our approach applies the concept of constitutionalisation, which we can only understand if we start from the more familiar idea of constitution. We find constitutions in classical political actors such as states, as well as in sub-state units, and ‘above the state’ in organisations such as the European Union. All of these political entities have been through complex ‘constitutionalisation’ processes, importing some or many of the virtues and values of constitutionalism and of a formalised constitution into both state and non-state political subjects or systems. Yet constitutionalisation is rooted as much in social as in legal processes (Scheppele 2017). At the abstract level, it can be defined as a process of constitution of collective subjects that might obtain the form of a formal constitution as a legal and ethical framework regulating relationships amongst involved individuals and between individuals and a central authority (e.g. a state), or may have a more informal outcome. Formalised constitutions help polities to operate in predictable ways. However, that predictability and the stability it engenders can only go so far. Crises erupt when constitutional mechanisms can no longer offer obvious solutions to changing political or social circumstances, or become obsolete in the face of evolving reality. Constitutionalisation is thus a useful term with which to go beyond the abstract level and to capture practices and processes that can never be fully petrified in constitutions, that undermine existing constitutions, and that create new cultural, political and social realities that might demand recognition and sometimes attempt to (re)define themselves through constitutions.

The tension between constitutionalisation as process and lived experience and existing constitutions as defined legal orders lies at the heart of our analysis. To exemplify these questions, we will use the focal point of cities, as evolving polities within global society, and the lenses of citizenship, which together operate as frames to help us understand the tensions which arise within political subjectivities when constitutionalisation processes are underway (Shaw 2020). The concrete circumstances of each city create both opportunities and obstacles in relation to the issue of constitutionalisation and also place them, unequally, on the planetary map. Crucially, in our approach we acknowledge difference and particularism, reflecting David Harvey’s assertion, in expounding his ‘theory of uneven geographical development’, regarding the benefits of a reconstructive approach:

I stand, in short, to learn far more about the urban process under capitalism by detailed reconstruction of how a particular city has evolved than I would from collection of empirical data sets from a sample of one hundred cities (Harvey 2019, 86).

Our approach to constitutionalisation, although rooted in the agonistic approach to democratic politics (see Mouffe 2016), in the constant clash between constitution and insurrection based in the demands for égaliberté (Balibar 2012), and in activist understandings of citizenship (Isin 2009), also maintains strong roots in the disciplines of constitutional law, constitutional studies and the study of governance. Some authors define constitutionalisation as ‘the attempt to subject all governmental action within a designated field to the structures, processes, principles, and values of a “constitution”’ (Loughlin 2010, 47). But such a definition inevitably begs the question of what type of ‘constitution’ we are referring to here. From a legal perspective, it could be said that we are in the era of the ‘post-sovereign’ state (MacCormick 1993), which is entwined within complex and constraining networks of legal regulation in an age of growing globalisation. These include collective trade agreements and security systems, as well as attempts to create universal binding commitments in the arena of climate change and emissions and ‘softer’ forms of normative guidance such as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (McAdam 2019). In sum, if even states are finding it hard to comb through and determine the legitimacy, authority and effectiveness of the various available sources of legal action, where does that leave the city? This is the starting point for our exploration, which exploits the embedded tensions within constitutionalisation for cities.

2. The contemporary city: constitutionalising forces vs. constitutionalised order

Cities represent simultaneously both one of the crucial evolving realities and at the same time blind spots in the interdependent political and economic order of the early 21^st century. Is it correct to say that we are already an ‘urban species’, as Edward Glaeser claims in his best-selling book The Triumph of the City (Glaeser 2011)? What we do know for sure is that more than 55% of humanity now lives in ‘urban settlements’; by 2030 this will rise to 60% (United Nations 2018). There are 33 mega cities with more than 10 m inhabitants today, with the largest at 37.5 m (Tokyo); by 2030 there will be 43 with Delhi expected to take the lead (38.9 m). This trend will continue in the decades to come highlighting the disjuncture between states as constitutive of international order and cities as constitutive of population distribution.

Historically, the city-state long predates the Westphalian (nation) state and is indelibly and even semantically associated with the rise of citizenship as a form of political subjectivity and membership status. Somehow, thousands of years later, the ancient Greek city is still thought to represent the historical ideal of citizenship. Furthermore, early modern citizenship has been reinvented within urban republics such as Florence, Genoa, Venice and Dubrovnik or within the network of Hanseatic and merchant cities, learning in some ways from the ancient polis (Pocock 1999). While, as a thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau inspired the French revolution that would inaugurate and confirm many core aspects of the nation-state model, thus superseding older allegedly less unifying alternatives, he actually believed that his own ideals could only be fully implemented within city-states that can guarantee meaningful democratic participation (Bertram 2004, 169).

Since the rise of the state in its various guises, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cities have historically lost out in the constitutional stakes. So far as concerns the internal organisation of those states (and the manner in which that internal organisation is recognised, for example, at the supranational level), they have mostly lost out to ‘regions’ or ‘federal states’ (Länder, autonomous communities, provinces, etc.) or, at the lowest level, to ‘local government’ or ‘municipal authorities’ (Finck 2017). None of those entities are completely concordant with growing cities and urban agglomerations. Yet cities (and the neighbourhoods within them) are of utmost importance to our sense of citizenship, belonging and participation, and to a sense of immediate identity through identification with the city as birthplace or as circumstantial or chosen residence. This is where most of us experience community and the virtues of civic life. Cities are where we protest against the status quo or where we demand a change concerning our societies, states, economy or the planet. They are the major engines of economic development and innovation and the principal places of cultural and artistic life. Yet with their greed for energy, their consumption of resources and their consequential pollution of the environment, they are also amongst the greatest threats to the future of human life on earth.

Cities are generally not legal entities of national or international order per se but rather economic, cultural, social and political constructs, encompassed within complex webs of legal regulation where many sources of authority are embedded in multi-level governance structures (Van Zeben 2017). Since this is where the majority of humanity already lives, it is in urban environments that we feel on our skins, as it were, the effects of globalised regulations. This paradoxical position of cities and their residents, placed at several stages removed from sites of global decision-making, both opens up some possibilities for action and also enlarges political tensions. Observers have already pointed out that many cities have been more proactive in trying to identify and implement legal and political solutions to some of the contemporary world’s most intractable problems than have been states. They have, for example, confronted and resisted the central state over issues such as refugee reception, so that some American cities have declared themselves Sanctuary Cities for immigrants. Municipal leaders, such as Domenico Lucano, the mayor of Riace in Italy, have found themselves subject to prosecution for aiding irregular migrants. The mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando offers the city’s citizenship to arriving migrants, and fights for the ‘abolition of residence permit’ in his Charter of Palermo (Orlando 2015). Most famously, Benjamin Barber (2013) published a plea to give more scope within global, regional and state governance structures to the city and its leaders, asking the question ‘What if mayors ruled the world?’

Underpinning our argument is the observation that cities are in the process of constituting themselves as semi-sovereign, autonomous and self-managed political entities and, at the same time, as the principal laboratories where urban citizenship is practiced and lived within a complex multi-layered constitutional setup of the global society. To give form to this observation, we look for ways of narrating the tension between the processes of (self-)constitutionalisation and the bottom up praxis of urban citizenship in order better to understand constitutionalisation as a contested process. It is, however, not expected that the city could immediately become a formal element in most constitutional arrangements, nor that their roles now or in the future will be uncontested (Turhan and Armiero 2019; Roy 2019). We have therefore chosen the term of constitutionalisation carefully to give us interpretative flexibility when confronted with both the gradual and often informal empowerment of cities as national and international political actors and the multiplicity of urban citizenship practices that feed into this major political and social development. It defies both the existing constitutions and international system, and the classical conception of state-centred citizenship. And this is where Balibar’s (2012, 438) argument that the history of citizenship is ‘a permanent dialectical tension between the moments of insurrection and the moments of constitution’ might help us to understand the constitutionalisation dynamic between the already constitutionalised order within which cities are embedded and the constitutionalising forces we can observe in contemporary cities.

In contrast to the relatively rigid concept of ‘sovereignty’ (Walker 2020), which seeks to know the decision-making authority in any given context, we use the idea of the ‘constitutionalisation of the city’ as a heuristic device offering guidance on how cities can be part of a responsive, participative and democratic governance framework appropriate to the task even of challenging the status quo within global society. Cities, in this context, are not essentialised as somehow inherently (more) democratic or progressive but opened up as critical and creative spaces for imagination, reflection and action (Turhan and Armiero 2019). In the words of Saskia Sassen, cities ‘can be seen as productive spaces for informal and not-yet-formalized politics and subjects’ (Sassen 2002, 4). The constitutionalisation of cities rests on the idea of an urban imagined community, which, to paraphrase Benedict Anderson (Anderson 2016), is ‘inherently limited’ by administrative city walls but is not and does not seek to be ‘inherently sovereign’ as does the national imagined community. Consequently, our approach leaves aside much which is pertinent to the conundrum of urban citizenship (Bauböck and Orgad 2020), such as attempts to give legal form to citizenship as status within the city or to understand the concept of domicile and residence (Bauder 2014). We rather approach citizenship within the city as social object insofar as documented or undocumented status forms our social relations, sense of self and dignity, and political participation (Vasiljević 2018). This point was clearly understood by the mayor of Palermo.

3. The creeping constitutionalisation of cities

In this section, we want to further elaborate on three already mentioned factors and how they influence the processes of constitutionalisation of cities and their inherent tensions: the tremendous growth of the cities; the evolving multi-layered constitutional setup within which cities are embedded, which provides opportunities and obstacles; and, finally, citizenship understood as both socio-political practice and urban lived experience.

When we talk about the urbanised planet, we do not talk only about the staggering expansion of metropolitan regions, especially in India, China and sub-Saharan Africa, or even about the parallel growth of the mid-sized cities with populations between 250,000 and 500,000 (United Nations 2018). Rather we recognise that it has become almost impossible to get off the ‘urban grid’, (i.e. to leave behind urban infrastructure, communications, housing standards, roads, electricity and digital connections). Against the background of such developments, one is compelled to think that the sheer economic and demographic weight of cities should be able to translate, sooner rather than later, into their robust political and legal constitutionalisation. This may not mean ‘more power’ in a formal sense, but our argument is that such constitutionalisation can render the role of cities in the contemporary constellation more intelligible to citizens and officials alike, as well as revealing the productive contestations around the status and role of the city.

When it comes to the constitutionalised order itself, very few cities are full-service states. Perhaps Singapore is the only good example; cases such as Monaco or Vatican City are rather different types of legal entities. Some cities or urban areas have a special status such as Hong Kong, Macau, Ceuta and Melilla, or Gibraltar. In other words, within the existing international order, there are very few instances where states or semi-autonomous entities coincide with the perimeters of city. All other cities in the world are defined by their place within administrative divisions of their national states, sometimes acquiring a certain level of autonomy. Good examples are cities that constitute a federal unit or an entity within the territorial division such as Buenos Aires (Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires) or the City of Vienna (both the capital city and a federal state).

Constitutional arrangements are being constantly re-scaled within globalisation processes that are accompanied by the production of overlapping political communities lacking distinct legal forms and defined mutual relations (Arrighi and Stjepanović 2019). These are the types of shocks and ruptures that reinforce the inadequacies of formal state-based constitutional arrangements, which highlight the need for the imaginative reconstruction of the constitution for the future, including at the local level via renewed conceptions of citizenship (Stahl 2020). In this context, the creeping constitutionalisation of cities within global society could be observed in various already existent autonomous practices: municipal assemblies in powerful and rich cities are often the sites of intense political struggles; sometimes cities, usually capital cities, are more powerful than states themselves; cities sometimes even create their semi-independent foreign policies (Herrschel and Newman 2017), connect with other cities or defy state authority. On the other hand, the constitutionalising forces are those that animate the constitutionalisation processes and can be observed in urban citizenship practices such as in the democratic innovations, including city or neighbourhood assemblies, autonomous forms of citizens’ self-governance in occupied spaces, common spaces and social centres or in urban gardens or parks managed by citizens themselves. Indeed, emerging urban political communities are already there, often involving non-national residents and refugees.

The constitutionalisation of cities, as we understand it, would also involve attempts at redefining the relationship between urban citizens and the governing institutions of their cities. There are various mechanisms of citizens’ participation in municipal politics whereby cities themselves respond to pressures of their citizens who want have a say in how their cities are run beyond local elections. Perhaps the most famous example, but it is not one devoid of controversy or polemical content, concerns the participatory budgeting first championed by the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre and now widely used in many municipalities (Cabannes and Lipietz 2018). Citizens are invited to influence and decide on some spending policies, usually limited to certain areas such as education or the space management and planning. The crucial question remains to what extent this limited participation responds to growing demands of continuous participation and transparency in spending public money. Although the forms will undoubtedly vary, it can be expected that both examples and varieties of citizens’ participation and deliberation will continue to grow and perhaps provide more formalised democratic fora (Piper 2014).

Sometimes these demands move to the terrain of direct management of available resources via formalised procedures such as municipal elections. The citizen platform of Barcelona en comú came to power in May 2015 after the series of street protests and civic experiments (Eizaguirre, Pradel-Miquel, and Garcia 2017; Blanco, Salazar, and Bianchi 2020). Elected mayor Ada Colau was then tasked with an ambitious agenda of reining in the growing gentrification and touristification of the Catalan capital as well as with tackling housing problems. It illustrates well the complexity of any ambitious municipal politics within a multi-layered European and global society as well as the specific challenge of combatting neo-liberal austerity (Thompson 2020). Barcelona was turned into the real battlefield during the push for Catalan independence in 2017–18. Barcelona’s new city government, brought into office with a progressive agenda, supported by many ‘unionists’ and ‘separatists’ alike, had to navigate the complicated legal and political battles between the independence-seeking regional government and the central powers in Madrid to which also belong the authority of the Kingdom of Spain, the clashes with the Spanish Constitutional Court over the interpretation of the Constitution and core understandings of what nation actually means in modern Spain, but also the institutions of the European Union which are better geared to recognise the central authorities of states than they are subnational entities.

It seems that direct conflicts between the nationalising state, that still sees itself as sovereign over its internationally recognised territory, and ever more assertive cities might further intensify. We already mentioned the conflict between Italian mayors and the Italian central government over the appropriate treatment of refugees and migrants. As in the case of ‘sanctuary cities’ in the US that seek to limit the federal authority over the immigration status of their residents, what is at stake is a different conception of citizenship and territory (Varsanyi 2020). Stepping away from formal procedures that strictly distinguish between citizens and foreigners and those with lawful or no lawful cause to be present, these cities want to treat, informally, people within their territory as equals. Instead of the idea of protected and rigid borders, they opt for fluidity and hospitality.

The old conception of state territory controlled by sovereign power is brought more radically into question in the Zapatistas regions and cities in southern Mexico where the over-lapping authorities have been the lived reality for more than two decades. The Zapatistas do not seek classical separation and independence but a renewal of the entire social contract. They are an insurrectional power and a constitutionalising force, sometimes tolerated and sometimes repressed, that wants to introduce buen gobierno through the system of parallel institutions that co-exists with the sovereign state’s institutions (Stavrides 2017; Baschet 2019). Furthermore, in the Kurdish areas of Turkey and Syria the concept of democratic confederalism was introduced by the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers Party, Abdullah Öcalan (Öcalan 2017). Inspired by Murray Bookchin’s communalism and libertarian municipalism (Bookchin 2018), Öcalan introduced a new phase of the Kurdish struggle through neighbourhood and municipal assemblies whose confederation is seen as an alternative path to the formation of independent Kurdish national state. Its emancipatory potential, such as the equal participation of women and minorities in the direct democratic assemblies in the cities and neighbourhoods of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, known as Rojava, has been observed with great interest by activists and scholars alike (Graeber 2014). However, its existence, successes and failures cannot be separated from the collapse of the Syrian state and the ensuing international war whose erratic course brought a heavy blow to this democratic experiment with the withdrawal of US forces and Turkish occupation from October 2019.

4. Ways of seeing the constitutionalisation of cities: character, processes, cityscape, and chronotopes

The above-mentioned examples could be seen as evolving processes, inspiring attempts, temporary actions, or blinking signs from the future. The question is whether cities can constitute themselves as entities in the making which have complicated (conflictual, competitive or even consensual) relationships, with other constituted entities in relation to political competences, or with how cities themselves as common and shared spaces may constitute ‘a’ or ‘the’ people through multiple forms of urban citizenship. In this section, drawing on traditions of visual ethnography, we suggest some possible ‘ways of seeing’ the constitutionalisation process in contemporary cities (Grimshaw 2001).

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all happy cities – especially in our utopian projections of ideal cities – are alike, and every unhappy city is unhappy in its own way. It is impossible to understand what is happening to and in cities without understanding their concrete circumstances, specific spatial and historic developments and thus the potentialities or limits of the constitutionalisation processes. To start with we suggest the following four questions, the answers to which would determine the tensions and outcomes of the constitutionalisation processes in any given city under scrutiny: what is its present character, and how it was shaped by geography and history? What social and economic processes could be observed in the city? How can we ‘read’ the changing cityscape which emerges consequent upon its character and the socio-economic processes that could also be influenced by citizens themselves and their collective action? And, finally, how do urban chronotopes, as specific amalgams of concrete spaces and historic experience, influence the present constitutionalisation processes, especially collective imaginary and action? In other words, although we theoretically want to understand the constitutive place of cities within the present and a future global society – or how cities are both influenced by global society and shape it – we are convinced that these four descriptive and interpretative interdependent elements could provide substantial assistance in the task of seeing how urban ‘uneven and combined development’ actually happens on the ground in any given case (Harvey 2019). Drawing on the remarks and reference points highlighted in the previous sections, our task, therefore, is to sketch in outline how the four elements could be used in future analyses.

How to describe the character of a given city? Is it a present or historic capital, a crossroads, a peripheral centre, a border post, a port, a fortress, a commercial hub, a modernist project, an industry-dependent urban settlement or a financial nucleus … ? These are not mutually exclusive characteristics. How does it define itself vis-à-vis its river – the Danube and the Rhine come to mind – and to what extent might a coastal city be open to the sea and the contested history of that sea, such as that of the Mediterranean, as well as its hinterland? The city before us must then be affected by its present or past conjunctures and can thus be neoliberal, post-socialist, global, imperial, post-colonial, or any combination of these historical and present conditions. If we look at it closely, it could be said to be crisis-ridden, austerity-affected, bankrupt, ‘smart’, post-war, disaster-hit or divided according to class, ethnicity, religion or race, although each of these characterisations may reflect more upon the writer than upon the city itself. There are certainly many adjectives that can be combined in such a way as to ‘describe’ the character of a given city as being at the same time ‘global, neoliberal and divided’; or ‘postcolonial and neoliberal’; or ‘austerity-hit, post-socialist and post-conflict’. Concretely, to illustrate what we have in mind when we talk about the character, let us briefly take a few heterogenous examples from three corners of the European continent, Glasgow, Helsinki, and Belgrade, and one from the very centre: Brussels.

Glasgow is a city in an ambiguous position due to its status as the largest city in the devolved UK nation of Scotland, but not the capital. It does not have Edinburgh’s governmental past, present or potential, post-independence, future. It is at the same time post-imperial and Atlantic in terms of its role in the slave trade and postcolonial in terms of historic patterns of immigration, and a city whose future may be post-British due to secessionist aspirations (which are stronger there than in Edinburgh). It thus sees itself increasingly as European and Scottish, and no longer British. Helsinki is a Nordic city (thus de-centred), a national capital of a state that uses the welfare state as a crucial part of its bordering, a regional capital (of the Baltic), but also a border city with its ports and its proximity and direct train route to St Petersburg. As a capital city of a relatively new state, it can claim just over one hundred years of ‘experience’. Belgrade is a non-EU capital (of various different configurations of Yugoslavia and now of Serbia), which is at the same time post-socialist, post-conflict and peripheral, with a crucial and yet ambiguous position within its region (the post-Yugoslav Balkans), where it is the largest city and also a meeting point in terms of several historic empires. There are not one, but two rivers at which confluence it stands, and it is profoundly marked by the legacy of socialist Yugoslavia including its break-up that eventually led to its isolation and bombing. Brussels offers a key to understanding how overlapping political communities may constitute themselves, being at the same time the post-imperial and post-colonial capital of Belgium and the ‘capital’ of the EU (at least in terms of political activities). Yet at the same time, it remains internally divided, officially bilingual but effectively multilingual and multicultural, with strong wealth inequalities (like Glasgow).

These short pen portraits cannot do full justice to the complex realities of the cities we mention, but they do show some of the determining frames within which their residents lead their lives. These lives are then substantially affected by socio-economic processes that might not have all the characteristics of well-researched ‘global cities’ (Sassen 2002) but could include the vacillating relationships between public and private spaces, gentrification and regeneration, touristification, securitisation, and degrading environment due to pollution or real estate speculation. Erratic moves of capital and investments as well as consumerist drives change the place where we live beyond recognition in a matter of few years both in cities that are global and in those that could have only regional and national outreach. People move in and out of neighbourhoods and between cities due to rising costs, the loss of community life and a sense of fear. Cities are shaped by wanted and unwanted newcomers such as tech experts in San Francisco or refugees making their way through the Balkans or via the sea to the north-western parts of Europe. And yet, city dwellers are not just passive recipients of global blows but rather they also seek ways to influence their environment, by inventing new practices of communal life from housing cooperatives to urban gardening, by conquering spaces of public institutions, empty building or parks, or by engaging in ethical and socially and ecologically responsible lifestyles, from buying choices to transport. Other types of processes might lead to open clashes with authorities, such as social influence of the political Islam in France. This led French President Emmanuel Macron to declare in October 2020 the need for a ‘republican reawakening’ against ‘Islamic separatism’. In his view, this alleged ‘separatism’ ‘translates into the constitution of a counter-society [emphasis added]’, especially in the suburbs.¹

Furthermore, we have to learn to ‘read’ the cityscape in order to understand, in the words of Walter Benjamin, urban physiognomy (Gilloch 1996, 19–21). It is through this that we learn ‘why cities look the way they do’ and why this, as argued by Richard Williams (2019), depends not only on urbanists and architects but also on flows of money, the redefinition of work, our sexual habits, war and urban violence or cultural policies and institutional politics. A visual method is needed to navigate, decipher and critically deconstruct urban physical landscape, the social, economic, political and cultural structures it displays or hides, as well as its potentialities for urban citizenship as lived experience, both physical and psycho-emotional, that itself is confined and determined by built environment.

Finally, to examine how our very bodies become politicised in urban spaces, we refer to the concept of the chronotope, developed by the literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. He describes this as the specific coupling of time and space that defines a literary work: ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin 1981, 84). The chronotope signifies both a specific time in a specific space; time that, even when not necessarily visible in a cityscape is present in that space and influences the present. Not every urban space has the same political, social and cultural weight so the socio-political gravitational power of a chonotope gives meaning to our collective actions (for the example of Tito street in Sarajevo, see Štiks 2019). Political regimes usually inscribe into the body of the city their symbols and wanted memory and at the same time they silence other narratives. This, sometimes in combination with processes of regime change, initiates political battles and attempts at effacing and rewriting history, through the change of street names or the ‘cancelling’ of undesirable heritage through physical removal of monuments, symbols and inscriptions. In some places, the chronotopes are highly visible, such as in Paris where Place de la République, Place de la Bastille, Place de la Nation or L’Arc de Triomphe function as designated rings for ideologically profiled political battles directly shaped by modern history. Staying in France, we can also say that the suburbs or banlieus have become a social and political chonotope signalling immigration, delinquency, riots, police repression but also, as Macron puts it, playing precisely on a collective imaginary of banlieus and a dangerous ‘separatism’ that seeks to constitute an alternative society to the core of republican power. On the other hand, some dormant chronotopes might be reactivated when the right time comes, bringing about something new or novel, that will be created by collective actions and the expected legacy of those actions. A good example of this re-imagining of the space can be found in the work of the University of Glasgow to come to terms with how it has benefited from the Atlantic slave trade over the centuries. Its commitments include the payment of reparations as an act of restorative justice and the creation of new educational resources to ensure that young people learn about the slave trade whilst at school in Scotland (Carrell 2019; Mullen 2021).

The four elements we suggest here – character, processes, cityscape, and chronotopes – are crucial ways to learn how to read and understand the constitutionalisation of cities as major social and political process in global society. They allow us to distinguish between different formal and informal processes within cities that position cities themselves in highly uneven ways on the global map. Cities as administrative units are attempting to carve out a different position for themselves in the 21^st century, which arguably breaks with many of the characteristics of modernism, which favoured (nation-)states and their relations. At the same time, the city is a laboratory for new forms of citizenship that generate new understandings of membership, participation and belonging removed from formal status and recognised passports towards lived experience of proximity and localised democratic experiences. This situation is necessarily one of uncertainty, tension and conflict but also of empowerment and creativity.

5. Conclusion: towards a new understanding of cities and citizenship in a global society

As we argued throughout this article, the political future will be (also and to a great degree) urban. However, the consequential re-scaling of constitutional processes does not necessarily mean a more inclusive, more equal or more democratic polity. We live in an era in which the global capitalist economy of the 21^st century as well as the influence of territorial and non-territorial entities render the status of citizen highly ambiguous, anxiety-ridden and unstable. Being citizen today means dealing with often undecipherable legal complexity, political frustrations but also unforeseen opportunities. Global migrations will surely intensify and they will be for the most part directed unevenly towards big cities. A wide range of different people (individuals and groups) with changing statuses and rights will rub shoulders in the same urban territory, although they might obey different rulers.

Cities are already the major battlefield of social struggles as well as primary theatres of violence and war. Nothing encourages us to think that this will come to an end any time soon. The exclusions, enclosures, and fences, incorporating both visible and invisible walls, are the growing reality of our urban experience. This is where global flows of capital demonstrate its splendour in concrete and glass, in luxury apartments and glittering skyscrapers, even swimming pools in the sky exclusively for the rich. The wealth attracts misery to keep the whole unequal organism alive and the contemporary misérables live in ruined neighbourhoods, distant suburbs and slams. In 1987, Brazilian geographer Mílton Santos described precisely the fact that citizens, even when formally equalised, have a different worth based on where they happen to be located. ‘Each man is worth for the place where he is: his value as a producer, consumer or citizen depends on his location in the territory … ’ (as translated and quoted by de Amorim Soares 2003, 211). Santos here still has in mind the territory of the nation-state; in the future of urban global society the worth of every individual will beyond doubt depend on his (sic) location in the city. Cities will influence their citizens, their individual, social and political potentialities and limits, based on their character, the processes shaping them, their built cityscape, and finally those specific sites that we call chronotopes, which are constitutive of political and social actions. In this article, we suggested these elements as means by which we can attempt to capture and configure the new cultural, political and social realities that demand recognition and that, as we explained earlier, attempt to (re)define themselves through constitutions.

Given our initial argument that the future of politics and thus citizenship will be urban, we can agree with Henri Lefebvre’s short remark that ‘the city dweller and the citizen must be linked but not conflated. The right to the city implies nothing less than a revolutionary conception of citizenship’ (Lefebvre 2014). That revolutionary conception that will profoundly redefine the ancient relationship between the city and citizenship is still to be invented through, as we argued here, the inevitable process of the external and internal constitutionalisation of cities whose results will depend on increasingly complex political struggles.

Acknowledgments

Work on this paper has been supported by the Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship Building Citizenship Regimes: a global perspective, MRF-2016-190, 2018-2022, by New Social Research at Tampere University, and by Social Contract in the 21^st Century, a research project based at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [MRF-2016-190].

Notes

1. In the article, President Macron is quoted as referring to a ‘projet conscient, théorisé’ [‘a theorised, self-aware project’, (i.e. Islamic separatism)], which – according to Macron – ‘se concrétise par des écarts répétés avec les valeurs de la République, se traduit souvent par la constitution d’une contre-société et donc la déscolarisation des enfants, le développement de pratiques sportives, culturelles communautarisées, l’endoctrinement’ [‘which takes the form of repeated departures from the values of the Republic, which often translates into the constitution of a counter-society and thus the removal of children from the educational system, the development of communitarian sporting and cultural practices, and even indoctrination’] (English translation by the authors); see ‘Emmanuel Macron présente son plan contre « le separatism islamiste »’, Le Monde, 2 October 2020, https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2020/10/02/emmanuel-macron-presente-son-plan-contre-le-separatisme-islamiste_6054517_823448.html (accessed on 11 August 2021).