Medieval modernity: On citizenship and urbanism in a global era

Abstract

This paper examines forms of citizenship associated with contemporary urbanism. Focusing on three paradigmatic spaces: the gated enclave, the regulated squatter settlement and the camp, the authors argue that the landscape of urban citizenship is increasingly fragmented and divided. These geographies are constituted through multiple and competing sovereignties which, when territorially exercised, produce fiefdoms of regulation or zones of ‘no-law’. In order to understand these practices, the authors employ the conceptual framework of the ‘medieval city’. This use of history as theory sheds light on particular types of urban citizenship, such as the ‘free town’ or the ‘ethnic quarter’, that were present at different moments of medievalism and that are congruent with current processes. The ‘medieval’ is invoked not as an historical period, but rather as a transhistorical analytical category that interrogates the modern at this moment of liberal empire.

This paper was presented at a number of conferences in the US and abroad including the IPHS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, and the Annual Urban History Conference at the University of California at Irvine. A different version of this paper is also being published in Applied Anthropologist (forthcoming).

Notes

1. The Chicago School is usually identified with the urban ecology approach. We are arguing that the ‘global city’ concept maintains this ecological approach, but applies it at a different scale—i.e. at the scale of the global rather than of the city.

2. For good coverage of these different interpretations of cities and citizenship, see Holston and Appadurai (1999).

3. It is important to note that the Guantanamo cases winding their way through the US Supreme Court are based on the writ of habeas corpus. Agamben interprets habeas corpus as

• the first recording of bare life as the new political subject … Nothing allows one to measure the difference between ancient and medieval freedom and the freedom at the basis of modern democracy better than this formula. It is not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives, nor even simply homo, but rather corpus that is the new subject of politics … You will have a body to show (Agamben, 1995, pp. 123–124).