The issue of city as community remains. For many people and for a very long time, the language of community has been self-evident. Communities function as havens in a heartless world and mediate clashing interests, yet communities are also under threat. Somehow where you find yourself is home and must therefore be automatically privileged. And given that most people now spend most of their time in cities, the link between home and city is increasingly taken for granted. To be fair, no one assumes that the city represents all its communities, but it is often claimed that the politics of the city is the politics of negotiating many communities in close proximity to each other. As such, there is talk about how different ethnic communities should live alongside each other, there is talk of the goods and evils of segregation (from ghettos to gated communities), there is talk about ways in which difference can be bridged, there is talk about building community out of different communities. This debate has given rise to the concept of diversity that now dominates urban political and policy thought, a concept centered on the idea of community.

But urban diversity might be interpreted less as a politics of community than as a politics of connectivity. Many communities have no choice. They are there because there was nowhere else to go or to belong. This kind of forced community is a community by default, and though it may have strengths, these are often the strengths of the beleaguered and desperate, longing to break out of community. Second, there seems real reason to question whether most urban dwellers feel that they belong to a community. Many of them have a series of distributed allegiances, which may or may not be local. So, while it is true that many urban residents might band together to fight rezoning or a government project, this may be very far from being an act of community, not least because it often actively involves the exclusion of others.

One might also question why people should have such power over their backyard. A politics of local community too often assumes that propinquity is a value in itself and automatically grants power, at the expense of the stranger and at the expense of local engagement in a wider political arena. The politics of community, moreover, rules out other local political possibilities. What we have in mind is a more agonistic politics that encourages disagreement, attempting at the same time to build consensus on issues of common concern by strengthening people’s diverse associations rather than focusing on their locality. In short, a politics of connection is growing as many urban dwellers increasingly do not think of community in terms of defending their turf.

Who is the Citizen?

Finally, we must consider the issue of citizenship, first by asking, ‘Citizen of what?’ In the past citizens were identified with cities, then more recently, with the nation-state. Now, with the advent of permanently urbanized space, we can see that citizenship is becoming identified with increasingly more spatial categories. For example, surveys show that people increasingly identify with the planetary scale (“citizens of the world”), the local scale, and a whole series of spaces in between. Although this tendency toward multiple spatial identification is stronger among younger people, more and more categories of people also lay claim to an identification with many spaces, such as cosmopolitans, immigrants, professionals, and many other ordinary folk whose lives are increasingly made through their multiple connections with the world. This suggests that people increasingly acknowledge the many spatial affiliations they have always had and are turning these into active political capital. We cannot yet speak of a new commons of citizenship arranged around an agreed set of wants and demands that form in many spaces at once. The category of citizenship that was formerly locked into very particular spaces is now being whittled away, however, and parts of it are relocating.

In this condition of citizenship, the urban is pluralized and distributed. First, the urban continues to house millions of dispossessed, dislocated, and illegal people, for whom any idea of citizenship is off the radar. These are people without rights to the spaces they occupy. The city, with its myriad of spaces, can thus provide a resource to those stripped of citizenship to survive and sometimes prosper. The existence of a whole series of quasi-citizenships also provides some recourse for those without formal political identity; such people can still take part in many urban political activities and can generally find at least some means of political expression. Put differently, the city for them is the only place of acquiring some political capital.

The urban can also act as a forcing ground for new claims, very often arising from varieties of citizenship juxtaposed. For example, the city locates people with an excess of citizenship, such as the international business elite, close to people with fewer possibilities, such as the low paid workers who do service for the former, and new challenges are created by this juxtaposition (e.g., a new politics of maids and masters increasingly drawn from around the world but with differentiated local capacity to influence, which links to new international political strategies, alliances, and movements, such as organizations campaigning for women’s rights). These urban environments help to reconfigure citizenship, with the urban as one key formative arena that any politics of citizenship at large cannot but take note of. Yet, writing and action on citizenship continues to remain remarkably wedded to the idea of the nation-state acting in an international arena as the ultimate arbiter.

Implications for International Affairs

All the above arguments suggest that the convention of international relations thinking need to be recast. To begin with, the contemporary urban condition produces new issues and questions which cannot be regarded as outside the purview of international affairs. This might include understanding what kinds of political influence migrate between cities, especially those that lie outside of the formal structures of municipal affairs: the politics of flows of pollution, people and things, the politics of styles of protest and demand first spawned in urban areas, the politics of movements that combine various urban impulses, such as the World Social Forum. Such various urban knowledges and practices are constantly being transferred internationally. Cities act as both incubators and exemplars.