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The terms of membership of a political unit (usually the nation-state) which secure certain rights and privileges to those who fulfil particular obligations. Citizenship is a concept, rather than a theory, which formalizes the conditions for full participation in a community. In modern times, the idea owes most to the work of T.H. Marshall whose writings on the civil, social and political rights of citizenship laid the foundations of the European welfare states.
Painter and Philo (1995) distinguish \'political\' forms of citizenship which are \'anchored in questions about the individual\'s position vis-Ã -vis an overarching political body\', from \'socio-cultural\' forms of citizenship, which are \'wrapped up in questions about who is accepted as a worthy, valuable and responsible member of an everyday community of living and working\' (p. 115). The concept of citizenship thus marks a point of contact between social, cultural and political geography, as well as a lens through which to view the history of the discipline (Driver and Maddrell, 1996). It refers to the range of formal and informal processes which determine people\'s inclusion in, and exclusion from, a variety of symbolic and material spaces and resources. Geography\'s distinctive contribution has been to draw attention to how space is implicated in the negotiation of the entitlements, obligations, meanings and effectiveness of citizenship. There are at least two broad ways of engaging with this (Smith, 1990).
First, the concept of citizenship can be used analytically, to expose differences in the de jure and de facto rights of different groups within and between nation-states. Formal citizenship is neither a necessary nor sufficient guarantee that rights and entitlements are extended to those who need them (Garcia, 1996). Changing patterns of eligibility are due not only to economic restructuring and cultural transformation but also to political realignments. These realignments have renegotiated the boundaries between civil society and the state in ways which vary through time and over space. In charting these geographies of citizenship, analysts have: mapped variations in the patriarchal assumptions which underpin the social contracts of most developed societies (see patriarchy); examined the racist and Eurocentric character of many countries\' immigration and nationality laws (see ethnocentrism; racism); and specified some key inequalities between localities and communities in the extent to which residents\' or members\' social, economic and political entitlements can be mobilized (Marston, 1990; Smith and Blanc, 1996; Swyngedouw, 1996).
Second, the concept of citizenship can be used normatively, as the basis for ideas about what a society that is sensitive to individual rights as well as to social justice should look like (cf. human rights). The quest for citizenship entitlements therefore provides a vision of, and a catalyst for, social transformation at a local, national, supranational and global scale. One project for political geographers will be to explore the tensions between local and national states and between national and supranational units arising from the struggle to win both the political power required to define citizenship rights and the fiscal powers required to guarantee them.
The prescriptive content of the idea of citizenship is not, however, something that is simply imposed on passive citizens by powerful politicians. It is true that one kind of \'active citizenship\' is about extracting obligations — requiring friends and relatives to provide caring services that were once extended by the state, expecting citizens to volunteer time and expertise to run operations previously staffed by local governments, and so on (Kearns, 1992). However, as Bell (1995) shows in his discussion of how citizenship is constructed through sexuality, and as several papers in the collection edited by Marston and Staeheli (1994) illustrate, people can create their own, alternative, geographies of citizenship which challenge the inconsistences and inequalities built into prevailing political norms.
What citizenship should be is therefore hotly disputed. One argument, usually associated with the political Right, is that the condition of full participation in society is the protection of property rights and personal wealth. The opportunity to participate in the economy is seen as the gateway to and guarantor of all other rights and entitlements within a market democracy, on the grounds that free markets are the fairest means of exchanging and distributing resources.
An opposing view argues that market inequalities deny some individuals their wider range of citizenship entitlements. The democratic Left favours state intervention to offset market inequalities, so ensuring that those without property rights or personal wealth have not only the opportunity but also the right — uncompromised by obligations — to participate in the full range of social affairs. (SJS)
References Bell, D. 1995: Pleasure and danger: the paradoxical spaces of sexual citizenship. Political Geography 14: 139-54. Driver, F. and Maddrell, A.M.C., eds, 1996: Geographical education and citizenship. Journal of Historical Geography 22, special section: 371-442. Garcia, S., ed., 1996: Cities and Citizenship. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20 (special issue). Kearns, G. 1992: Active citizenship and urban governance. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 17: 20-34. Marston, S. 1990: Who are \'the people\'? Gender, citizenship and the making of the American nation. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 8: 449-58. Marston, S. and Staeheli, L.A., eds, 1994: Restructuring citizenship. Environment and Planning A 26 (special issue). Painter, J. and Philo, C., eds, 1995: Spaces of citizenship. Political Geography 14 (special issue). Smith, S.J. 1990: Society, space and citizenship: a human geography for the \'new times\'. Transactions, Institute of British Geographers NS 14: 144-56. Smith, D.M. and Blanc, M. 1996: Citizenship, nationality and ethnic minorities in three European nations. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 20: 66-82. Swyngedouw, E. 1996: Reconstructing citizenship, the re-shaping of the state and the new authoritarianism: closing the Belgian mines. Urban Studies 33: 1499-521.
Suggested Reading Kofman, E. and England, K., eds, 1997: Citizenship and international migration. Environment and Planning A 29 (special issue). Marston and Staeheli (1994). Painter and Philo (1995). |
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