Political Agglomerations

Holston and Appadurai's article is dated. It's difficult to read a 1990 article from the perspective of immigration policy of the Western world as it stands in 2013 without a very large grain of salt! The distinction between "formal" and "substantive" citizenship (the former to mean a certificate and the latter a series of rights a person exercises on a daily basis), is interesting, but I think the authors are speaking far too generally and make no compelling argument linking cities and citizenship. It is not at all true to say that "legally resident noncitizens, and even legally resident ones, often possess virtually identical socio-economic and civil rights as citizens". I have been an immigrant in the UK, and now the US, since 2007, and in neither country have I had "virtually identical" rights as citizens. In the UK I had access to healthcare and I had the right to work (and occasionally even vote), but I had no recourse to public funds should I become unemployed, even though I was contributing taxes. In the US, I was not allowed to work at all when I first arrived as an H-4 dependent. Many people who are US residents, but not citizens, may have different rights to members of their own family. As visa systems crack down on even middle class skilled workers, citizenship is very highly sought after. The relationship the authors try to illustrate between citizenship and the city is awkward in this reading -at the same time the authors argue for a citizenship based on a more localized scale, their article is not anchored enough to make this argument compelling - referencing such disparate cities as London, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, Paris, Bombay. The claim that the urban poor unite to fight for rights to the city contradicts Davis' argument in "Slums" that one of the major problems with the growth of informal settlements is the inability for urban fringe dwellers to coordinate collective action, in contrast to the urban center dwellers of previous eras.