Cities and citizenship: The multilevel governance of social policy

Cities are the birthplace of citizenship. Being part of the Greek polis or of medieval cities in Europe had important implications in terms of inclusion and exclusion and of duties and rights. This still holds true in Mainland China where the hukou system differentiates rights between urban and rural populations. In order to better understand the relationship between cities and citizenship this analysis identifies the analytical dimensions that play a relevant role in their dynamic and to disentangle how the different spatial scales contribute to the political and social dimension of citizenship. This chapter focuses on the relationship between cities and citizenship, identifying the elements that play a pivotal role in this relationship: politics, sovereignty, policy and context. This is followed by a section on the role of urban citizenship and how this dimension of citizenship affects its relationship with cities. Embedding cities’ citizenship into a multilevel governance scalar approach means not only focusing on how the process works or on how actors act strategically. It means also examining the logic that frame if and how decisions are made (and the resulting flow of resources), defining the political space of the local, and the choice of urban actors.