Spaces of citizenship: an introduction

EINEMANN

Politic~I Geography, Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 107~120,1995 Copyright @ 1995 Elsetier Science Ltd Printed in Great Britain. AU tights reserved 0962&?9&95 $10.00 + 0.00

WORTH

Spaces of citizenship: an introduction JOEPAINTER

Dqw-tment of Geography, Universityof Durham, SciencesSite,South Road, Durham DHl3LE, UK AND

CHRISPHIL

Department Of Geog?z@y, Universi~ of WalesLumpeter,Lampeter,Dyfed SA48 7ED, UK

ABSTRACT. The various papers and commentaries in this issue are framed by a brief discussion of (1) the growing significance for human geographers of ‘citizenship’ as both a source of concepts and a focus for substantive research; (2) the way in which citizenship serves as a meeting-point for the contemporary concerns of both political geographers and social-cultural geographers; and (3) the various different kinds of ‘spaces’ in and through which citizenship is

fostered, practised and contested, all of which are tackled in the contributions to the issue.

Writing in the earlier years of this century H. J. Fleure hoped that the discipline of geography would ‘become more widely useful as an instrument of humanist education. . and at the same time. a valuable influence in the enrichment of citizenship’ (quoted in Bowen, 1976: 6). Just over 50 years later Susan Smith called for heightened attention to the intersections of ‘society, space and citizenship’, claiming that such attention ‘helps explain the structuring of society, but it also provides some normative principles to guide the restructuring of society. It promises, then, one route towards a human geography for the new times’ (Smith, 1989: 154). A sensitivity to the geographies of the human world and a concern for the modalities of citizenship have thus long gone together, and we would argue that a ‘map’ of the connections between geography and citizenship has often been central to the deliberations of academics, politicians, activists and others. In the discipline of geography itself this is certainly the case, we would suggest, and a whole genealogy of geographical interest in the practices denoted as ‘citizenship’ can be traced from the texts of the classical geographers such as Ptolemy and Strabo (whose ideas intersected with the earliest institutionalization of citizenship as a political system) to those of the most recent feminist and post-colonial geographers (whose ideas constantly worry at the inclusions and exclusions endemic to both formal and informal structures of ‘who’ can belong ‘where’).

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This being said, explicit and sustained consideration of citizenship within the discipline has not been all that great, and this is why Smith’s paper of 1989 (and see also Kearns, 1992) effectively opened up new avenues for geographical inquiry into not only the condition of the ‘new times’ (the putative new epoch of human experience in the late 20th~century ‘West’) but also the conditions of many different periods and places. Indeed, the possibility is signposted here for thinking about how the material spaces of human society, the complex mixtures of places and territories supporting more-or-less institutional entities such as communities and states, are related to the varying constructions of citizenship present in shared understandings (more-or-less articulated) regarding what sorts of individuals and groupings can ‘properly’ live and work in these spaces (and then of both the ‘rights’ that citizens enjoy in these spaces and the ‘obligations’ that they have towards the other occupants and possessions of these spaces). And it is not only material spaces as sites for citizenship that now enter into the geographer’s view, it is also the immaterial spaces of the mind-what we might term ‘imaginative geographies’, following Edward Said (1978)~that become important, since it is in this realm of assumptions, fears and prejudices that citizenship in both its dejure and def&o guises is invented prior to its installation in actual practices ‘on the ground. The contributions to this volume all proceed from a disciplinary basis in geography to tackle aspects of these tangled material and immaterial spaces of citizenship, and in so doing-and in tandem with the papers in the Marston and Staeheli (1994) collection-they make an intervention in the debates around citizenship that potentially ‘will travel quite well outside the discipline’ to speak to the concerns of ‘social and political theorists as well as policy makers and politicians’ (Marston, this issue). it the same time, and just as social and political theorists have found themselves encountering each other (complete with their respective baggages of concepts, methods and examples) when examining citizenship, so this notion is becoming an exciting focus for a coming together of the subdisciplinary fields of social-cultural geography on the one hand and political geography on the other. It is true that citizenship is usually treated as the province of political theory and thereby given a precise definition in ‘political’ terms, as can be seen from the first part of a recent dictionary entry where citizenship is defined as follows: Refers to the terms of membership of a political unit (usually the nation-state) which secure certain rights and privileges to those who fulf11 particular obligations. Citizenship is a concept, rather than a theory, which formalises the conditions for full participation in a community. (Smith, 1994: 67) This ‘political’ approach to citizenship has many strengths, notably because it raises normative questions about how the political life of a given spatial unit might be best conducted to create a healthy mix of rights and obligations for its occupants, and it is one that has often been touched upon (if not addressed directly) by political geographers. Hence, integral to much political-geographical work both old and new on states, nations, boundaries and territories have been questions about ‘whose’ political units are being considered, about ‘whose’ interests are being served when states and nations go to war, about what is at stake when certain peoples and places call for political independence from other peoples and places, and about where lines have been and could be drawn ‘on maps’ to designate all manner of territorial allegiances, alliances and alternatives (see, for instance, Taylor, 1989). And in these studies a political geography of citizenship can be described as very much already on the agenda. But the ‘political’ approach has been criticized by some as overly partial, and by others

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(such as Ma&an, this issue) as positively unhelpful, and in numerous texts the insights of political theory have bumped up against the probings of a social theory attuned to the more social-cultural dimensions of whether or not individuals and groupings can be (in both actuality and feeling) members of a wider community. Running alongside her ‘political’ definition of citizenship repeated above, for instance, Smith explains how the current recasting of citizenship in the ‘West’ is dependent not only on changes in the ideologies, apparatuses and capacities of the state, but is also growing out of complex ‘social-cultural’ transformations (themselves bound up in the economic restructurings of advanced capitalism) which are reconstituting social and cultural relations between myriad peoples and places. More specifically, she outlines three different lines of study integral to ‘charting these geographies of citizenship’: analysts have mapped variations in the patriarchal assumptions which underpin the social contracts of most developed societies. .; examined the racist and Eurocentric character of many countries’ immigration and nationality laws. .; and specified some key inequalities between localities and communities in the extent to which residents’ or members’ social, economic and political entitlements can be mobilised. (Smith, 1994: 67)

The approach to citizenship indicated here fuses a ‘social-cultural’ sensitivity, which is itself alert to the economic geographies making available resources for the practice of citizenship in some places but not in others (see Kearns, this issue), with the ‘political’ lens on forging and contesting citizenship. In the process the concerns of a social-cultural geography (which is itself undergoing considerable rethinking-see, for instance, Anderson and Gale, 1992; Jackson, 1989; Philo, 1991) are brought very directly into contact with the ongoing (if now remodelled) concerns of political geography. We do not want to make too much of this subdisciplinary convergence around citizenship, but we would none the less wish to make strong claims about needing to examine how citizenship becomes inscribed in the intersections between political and social-cultural ‘spaces’. We therefore pick up on Smith’s point in her 1989 paper, leading from her remarks about ‘citizenship as critique’ uncovering the spatially uneven relationship between state and civil society, where she highlights ‘the analytical relevance of the citizenship perspective in exploring this interface between political arrangements and social structures’ (Smith, 1989: 148). Moreover, it is out of a desire to see some substantive flesh placed on the bare bones of such an abstract argument that the present theme issue has emerged, in that we-along with Eleonore Kofman and Steve Pile-convened a session at an Annual Conference of the Institute of British Geographers (the 1993 meeting at Royal Holloway, London) which was held under the umbrella of the Institute’s ‘Social and Cultural Geography’ and ‘Political Geography’ study groups. As one of us indicated in a report on the session: It was entirely appropriate that the session should be jointly organised between the two study groups, given that on the one hand it asked political questions about the mechanisms through which human subjects are connected to a supra-individual ‘body’ (casually the state) guaranteeing rights but imposing obligations, whereas on the other hand it asked social-cultural questions about the grounds on which individuals are considered appropriate for inclusion in the category of ‘normal’ person capable of participation in a wider community life. (Philo, 1993: 194) This session involved a number of papers that took different cuts through the geographies of citizenship, and included contributions that ranged from a study of citizenship rights

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being withdrawn from members of Docklands communities in London by new forms of local governance built on ‘partnership’ between developers and local authorities (Colenutt, 1993; see also Pile, this issue), to a study of the creation of new ‘victim groups’ such as the Russians outside Russia as a result of the political-legal restructuring of the post-Soviet world (G. E. Smith, 1993), to a study of the transformations in citizenship being occasioned in late and post-Apartheid South Africa as the vote is extended to peoples who may begin to imagine their rights and obligations in terms difficult to manage by the new black leaders of the republic (Robinson, 1993). Four of the papers delivered in the session hung together particularly well thanks to a complementarity in their theoretical takes on the ‘spaces of citizenship’ theme, and to cut a long story short we are now pleased to present revised written versions of the papers by Eleonore Kofman, David Bell, Ade Kearns and Nicholas Fyfe, and to run these papers alongside commentaries from Susan Smith, Sallie Marston, Steve Pile and Sara Ma&an. Spaces of citizenship: some lines of thought Territories, politicalunits, bounded wholes It will perhaps be useful to offer a few thoughts here about the various ways in which ‘spaces of citizenship’ have been, and could in the future, be constituted. The most obvious sense in which citizenship is ‘mapped on to space is the one signalled in classical antiquity, the Greek ‘city-state’ as a settlement centred on an open public space where all significant inhabitants (the ‘warriors’) could meet around a circle as equals who in principle would be fully exchangeable one with another. France Farinelli (pers. comm.) regards this arrangement as a founding moment in the conceptualization of social relations in spatial-geometric terms, and Derek Heater (1990) traces the connections from the model to actual city-states functioning (if partially) as bounded spaces in which citizenship was instituted and acted out. In his Politics Aristotle had declared that ‘man is a political animal’ (the gendering of this claim being far from incidental: see below), and then insisted that ‘he could reach the full potential of his life and personality only by participation in the affairs of the polis (city-state)’ (Heater, 1990: 3). Furthermore: Aristotle was quite dogmatic that in order to discharge their functions effectively citizens must inhabit a city-state that is exceedingly compact and close-knit. He severely took to task his mentor Plato for indicating that a citizen-body of 5000 would be ideal. This number, he asserted, would require space of ‘unlimited extent, such as the sprawling land of Babylon. Military command, public communication and judicial judgement would be impossible in such a large community. The quality of citizenship would be bound to suffer from the lack of necessary intimacy. (Heater, 1990: 3)

The implication was that a successful city-state would need to be one in which a high level of inter-subjective contact could be achieved, where all of the people deemed to be citizens could know one of another and meet in a space set apart for the purpose. Although in practice city-states such as Athens grew larger and more impersonal than Aristotle envisaged, it is none the less stated by one geographer considering Ancient Greece that ‘the whole tendency of geography was to the development of small independent city-states’ (Kermack, 1927: 37-38), and that the clustering of settlement around sheltered ‘rock citadels’ must be noted along with the possibility of cultivating olives and vines on the slopes below the main town houses. The logic is therefore of a distinctive form of political citizenship built around, and being very much dependent

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upon, a set of underlying spaces considered in both their abstract geometric qualities and their concrete environmental ones. The Greek city-state thereby operated by demarcating clearly a place or territory in which the residents (or at least the more privileged of them) were given a definite identity-a dweller of Athens, for instance-which brought with it a specified set of rights and also obligations for these residents. This identity was to frame all manner of interactions between city-states: members of one city-state could not belong to another one, and if circumstances led them to a city-state other than their own they would either be chased out or accepted under sufferance, and at the same time these city-states would relate to one another as different entities with different interests, whether trading, negotiating or warring. This was a situation in which citizenship was tightly circumscribed by, and defined through, a space with definite boundaries that were designed to be largely impermeable to the flow of identities. At the risk of grossly overstating the lineage, it would not seem inappropriate to argue that citizenship 3s many of us in the late 20th-century western world have come to know it proceeds on much the same pattern as that of the Greek city-state, in that it rests upon the construction of an identity, complete with a related package of known rights and obligations, which posits residence in a definable place or (commonly quite sizeable) territory as the basis for the nurturing and preservation of this identity. We are obviously talking here about the invention of the modern state from at least the 16th century in Europe, when the ‘divine’ and ‘monarchical’ claims over land of earlier centuries began to fuse with (and to some extent be replaced by) the rational calculations and procedures of an administrative apparatus linking dominant centres to subordinate peripheries (see, for instance, the discussion in Dodgshon, 1987). And this development obviously coincided with the creation of the modern citizen as the individual whose identity (in political terms at least) was supposed to be thrown in with the particular state, complete with its delimited territory or state area’, where he or she came to be resident for most of the time. Michael Dear actually defines the ‘state’ in this way: Traditionally regarded as an area of land (or land and water) with relatively well-defined, internationally-recognised, political boundaries. Within this territory resides a people with an independent political identity, usually referred to as nationalism. This traditional use of the term is perhaps better confined to the notion of the nation-state., (Dear, 1993: 591-592) Dear goes on to explain the broader political-economic debates spiralling around what he calls the ‘theory of the state’, but the key point for us is the equation of state, territory and a distinct ‘political identity’ which suggests a structural connection between citizenship and space similar at root to that energizing the Greek city-state. It also suggests a fundamentally exchsionmy impetus in which political citizenship is 311about ‘us here’ being tied to the supra-individual political machinery that governs ‘us here’, thus calling forth almost inevitably a hostility to ‘them there’ and to the political machineries governing ‘them there’. These are implications addressed by several contributors to the volume, notably by Kofman looking at the current European picture, but also by both Kearns and Fyfe as they examine the most recent rhetorics of citizenship in Britain which are recasting the relationship between state and citizen but still asserting the legitimacy of the state-territory-identity axis. The political geography of this running together of citizenship and space is considerably more complex than a simple setting up of ‘us here’ against ‘them there’, however, and it must be recognized that residence in the city-state or the state-area has not been the only basis on which ‘true’ citizenship has been publicly recognized down the centuries. Dear’s

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reference to the phenomenon of ‘nationalism’ (and then to the idea of the ‘nation-state’) gestures to this complexity, since it is obvious that most modern states are bound up with a dominant sense on the part of many people that they share a common ‘national’ identity moored in a shared history and culture-as knotted up with commonalities in those vexed domains of ethnic&y, language and religion -which should be matched up to the formal institutions of a state (government, law, police) guaranteeing ‘national’ self-determination within given territorial limits (the ‘imagined place’ coincident with the ‘imagined community’ of the nation: see Anderson, 1983). What this means, as all sorts of people are all too aware in the contemporary world, is that it is often not enough merely to be ‘denizens’ of a state-area to be accepted as full citizens of that area (and see Kofman, this issue). The linkage of citizenship and space here becomes one in which citizenship is measured not only against ‘them there’ but also to some extent against what might be termed ‘them here’: and in this case the bounded space of citizenship becomes one that cannot be straightforwardly indusionmy because some of the people resident within the territorial limits are not properly regarded as being ‘like us’ who are fashioned out of the same historical, cultural, ethnic, linguistic and even religious materials (the soil of the nation-state). And, although this need not be the consequence, all too commonly such a situation can become very uncomfortable for the people who are not ‘like us’, and who (particularly at times of economic and political instability within the state-area) are likely to be treated badly (as distinctly ‘second-class citizens’) and either encouraged or forced to leave the nation-state’s spaces where their credentials for citizenship are uncertain. The scenario painted here is a familiar one, to be sure, and there are a host of theoretical equipments derived from psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and anthropology that explore the will to exclude-the desire to eject, to purify, to avoid ‘pollution’-manifested when ‘us here’ (in ‘our’ nation-state) seek to banish the unwanted from our immediate geographical proximity (see, for instance, Sibley, 1981, 1988). One possibility is Georg Simmel’s notion of ‘the stranger’, not so much as the person who ‘comes today and goes tomorrow’ as the person who ‘comes today and chooses to stay’, a notion that has been extended by sociologists of African history to talk of stranger groups who differ in their histories and cultures quite dramatically from the indigenous groups of the localities where they end up living and working (we are drawing here on Simmel, 1908, and also on Shack and Skinner, 1978; see too the early pages of Shields, 1992). Simmel once wrote of the ‘continuance of locality’, essentially a ‘psychical factor which makes the territorial substratum a unity’ (Simmel, 1898, in Park and Burgess, 1921: 350), and he thereby explained why a human group associated with a specifiable territory can be so easily disturbed when the territory’s boundaries are crossed by strangers who cannot ever possess the same deep psychic attachment to it: [The stranger] is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he [sic] has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fured within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this group is determined, essentially by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself. (Simmel, 1908, in Wolff, 1950: 402)

We cannot do justice to the substantive details here, but it is revealing how-in the wake of Elliott Skinner (1965) identifying ‘permanent stranger communities’ appearing in many West African societies from as early as the 18th cenhxy-a narrative of sorts has been proposed to chart the changing fate of African stranger communities (peoples occupying

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parts of the continent other than their ancestral homelands) to the colonial and then to the post-colonial:

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period

Strangers, in the Simmelian sense, were marginal as well as integral elements of African social and political systems long before the beginning of colonial rule. . Colonial administration transformed the character of what were in essence ritually ‘closed’ boundaries demarcating distinct indigenous African political entities. This alien authority, in turn, created ‘open’ systems which facilitated the spatial passage of strangers between one polity and another. Political independence and the emergence of new African states brought about a rebirth of the ‘closed’ system. [T]he new states defined more rigorously than ever before the social, structural and status positions of one African group as against another. Thus in several new African states, strangers who were formerly ‘accepted’ have been expelled or mandated for repatriation to their [ancestral] homelands. (Shack, 1978: 44-45; see also the other contributions to Shack and Skinner, 1978)

Simmel’s social geography of strangers is serving in this passage to clarify the shifting character of interactions occurring within African states between indigenous and stranger communities, the former comprising in effect the bona fiak citizens of the states concerned whereas the latter (despite centuries of residence in the regions involved) always remain socially marginal and likely to lose any kind of citizen status (however ‘second class’ this might have been in practice), with one possible consequence being complete expulsion from the host spaces of citizenship.

Networks, social-cultural relations, dipersed~agments The argument should now have demonstrated

that social-cultural relations are intrinsic to the political relationship between citizenship and space, in that who gets defined as a ‘true’ citizen within the city-state or the state-area depends in part on who carries with them what is deemed to be the correct baggage of history, culture, ethnic@ language and religion. But the picture is more messy still, in part because there are yet other dimensions of ‘humanness’ that potentially cut across what are commonly regarded as the qualities required for a person to be granted citizenship status v&&v& a supra-individual political entity (to be deserving of rights and capable of meeting obligations). And if we return again to the Greek city-state we can detect what is involved here, first by hearing Kermack’s note that ‘[lleisure for the citizen was frankly secured by the work of slaves, and the citizens were men only, not women’ (Kermack, 1927: 39), and, second, by hearing Heater’s account of Aristotle’s dilemma in establishing who should be eligible for citizenship in the city-state: He was at pains to distinguish true citizens from those who cannot justly claim the title. The young, the old and the workingmen (‘mechanics’) worried him. Immaturity and infirmity respectively should bar the first two categories even when the individuals belonged to the citizen class (for the status was in practice very commonly inherited). Workingmen presented a different problem. Aristotle had reluctantly to agree that in practice in many states they were admitted to citizenship, though by virtue of their occupations they have neither the aptitude nor leisure to display true excellence in citizenship qualities. However, as a general rule a citizen is a man ‘who enjoys the right of sharing in deliberate or judicial office. _’(Heater, 1990: 3)

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In the city-state the citizen was thus to be a man of middling age with the resources to ensure leisure time to take seriously the taxing affairs of state, and should also be one drawn from that ‘class’ which across the generations had become adapted to the twin role of ruling and being ruled, and it is evident that a host of ‘others’ upon whom the city-state depended for its continuance-women, children, workers and even slaves (many of whom would also be non-natives)-could not hope to attain the status of citizen. Once again, then, we encounter people who might be present in the spaces of citizenship (within the place or territory, even allowed to stroll through the public spaces of civic decision making) but who remain in effect spatially invisible non-citizens. This denial of citizenship to many non-conforming ‘others’ is regrettably a further continuity that can be traced from antiquity to the modern era, even if the precise details of who gets excluded and why have shifted about, and this is the chief reason why many contemporary critics would assert that the very concept of citizenship is indelibly flawed-is fatally compromised by the exclusions of its birth-and therefore should be jettisoned as a tool of any interest to an emancipatory politics. Of particular pertinence has been the feminist critique of citizenship (see both Kofman and Bell, this issue), as propelled by anger at ‘the symbolic spatial division of the world into a male public sphere and a female private sphere, a division which began to emerge in the claim of seventeenth-century male contract theorists that wives, and women more generally, were unfit to be citzens’ (Rose, 1990: 395). The image of the soldier-citizen, the heroic male figure striding commandingly through the sites and activities of public space, is hence one that has been challenged by women-from the suffragettes to the feminist movement-in a dual attack which is itself ‘ambivalent’ (Rose, 1991) about whether the whole edifice of citizenship should be brought tumbling down or colonized (and thereby transformed) by women as part of a broader-based strategy of liberation. But it is not only in the realm of gender relations that political citizenship has been challenged, and it would be possible to rehearse a series of arguments emanating from across the full spectrum of social-cultural relations that express a similar ambivalence about whether citizenship should be abandoned as a meaningful way of thinking politics or whether something of value can still be salvaged for alternative projects. Of great poignancy in this respect are the claims made about citizenship and mental infirmity, given that central to the conventional model of the citizen is a set of assumptions about having the capacities of mind to reflect critically on the ways of the world, and what this has often meant is that people with ‘mental illnesses’ and ‘mental handicaps’ have been debarred from the normal benefits of citizenship (the right to vote, to give evidence, to be consulted on matters

affecting

their

lives):

Failure to be taken seriously is one aspect of the spoiled identity of mental patiets: by becoming part of the in-patien psychiatric system, they lose social standing. Their words are not given the weight accorded to those of most nther citizens. Few hospital studies indicate that evidence has been taken from consumers-Hospital Advisory Service reports frequently omit any mention of patients’ views. (Brandon, 1981: 6)

Many campaigning organizations in the field of mental health are critical of assumptions about the rational, coherent and knowledgeable citizen that effectively prevent mental patients from being listened to in the public realm, but at the same time these organizations fight in the name of citizenship to try to secure rights and an enhanced quality of life for mental patients both inside and outside the ‘asylum’. The story can be repeated many times over and in many guises, and think of the case of

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Margaret sitting beside her 92-year-old father in a coma after a massive stroke and now dead in all but the clinical sense, and think of her worrying about the possibility of withdrawing the drips which were keeping him alive: She thought of the bed shortage. She knew that in all probability a younger, worthier candidate for the care and resources that might be lavished upon her father was worsening in the wings. And then she said no. No, she did not want her father to starve to death, nor did she want him to drown in his own lung fluid. She knew she was being bolshie, but dammit all, what was the rush? Her father was a good citizen. He’s paid his dues. (Vincent, 1994: 9) Here the model of the citizen as the capable and active individual is a crucial context (see also both Kearns and Ma&an, this issue), and one implication is that the elderly person who has ceased to meet these criteria no longer warrants being valued as a citizen worth keeping alive. Indeed, Vincent mentions the documents of euthanatists which declare that ‘when we cease to be of use to ourselves or to others, we would wish to be bumped off as soon as possible. It’s the decent, citizenly thing to do’ (Vincent, 1994: 10). But at the same time a powerful counter-argument can be advanced, one that uses the rhetorics of citizenship in which the ‘right to rights’ can be claimed for even the most frail and inactive of elderly people, particularly if it is reasoned that having been a ‘good citizen’ then should allow the continued extension of citizenship rights now. We thus see once more the ambivalent response to citizenship, one that is critical of how it tends to ‘disenfranchise’ so many people on so many grounds, but one that also hopes to glean from the concept positive tools and benefits that can still help in the struggle to create improved lives (and more egalitarian geographies) for all of those ‘others’ initially absent from Aristotle’s prescriptions. It should be noticed that in the above discussion the terms of reference have begun to shift away from the decidedly ‘political’ form of citizenship, anchored in questions about the individual’s position vis-ci-vis an overarching political body, to a more diffuse ‘social-cultural’ form of citizenship wrapped up in questions about who is accepted as a worthy, valuable and responsible member of an everyday community of living and working. It is hence the relationship between individuals and their immediate communities that swims into focus, and in consequence we must begin to take seriously the much more informal rules and norms shared by ‘local majorities’, which undoubtedly create a sense of who can be included and who cannot. We would suggest that these informal understandings are always linked into the more institutionalized specifications about rights and obligations usually regarded as the terrain of citizenship-and such understandings might be viewed as the soil out of which institutional specifications inevitably grow-but we would also insist that more informal designations of citizenship retain a dynamic of their own which demands explicit consideration. Such consideration is something that social-cultural geographers are already offering in many of their studies, particularly given the claim that if citizenship is to mean anything in an everyday sense it should mean the ability of individuals to occupy public spaces in a manner that does not compromise their self-identity, let alone obstruct, threaten or even harm them more materially. If people cannot be present in public spaces (streets, squares, parks, cinemas, churches, town halls) without feeling uncomfortable, victimized and basically ‘out of place’, then it must be questionable whether or not these people can be regarded as citizens at all; or, at least, whether they will regard themselves as full citizens of their host community able to exist on an equal footing with other people who seem perfectly ‘at home’ when moving about in public spaces. And a signal component of current

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social-cultural geography is the study of how public space in the ‘West’ is coded in a variety of ways as predominantly for certain categories of people rather than for others, in everything from the symbols on lavatory doors through the disapproving stares of passers-by to the possibility of police harassment. The argument is that all manner of ‘others’ have to pretend more-or-less consciously to be what they are not in this space, and it is possible to list numerous works offering accounts of the tensions and struggles arising in this respect: for being a woman in man’s space (Rose, 1993; Tivers, 1985); a gay, lesbian or bisexual person in heterosexual space (Bell, this issue; Valentine, 1993); a person with a mental health problem in ‘sane’ space (Parr, 1994); a child in adult space (James, 1990; Ward, 1978); an elderly person in ‘younger’ space (Laws, 1993); a disabled person in ‘non-disabled space (Hahn, 1986, 1989); a nomad-traveller in ‘sedentary’ settled space (Cresswell, forthcoming; Sibley, 1981, 1992). And the argument is then that these various human groups, to varying degrees in the intensity of their feelings of being compromised, unwanted and excluded, are none the less all being turned into less-than-full-and-equal citizens of the places and societies in which they find themselves. The issues involved here are expressed with peculiar force in the writing of bell hooks, who reveals from first-hand experience the tensions and struggles integral to being a person of colour moving through the ‘whitened spaces (complete with their ‘black looks’) of a United States town: I learned as a child that to be ‘safe’,it was important to recognise the power of whiteness, even to fear it, and to avoid encounter. There was nothing terrifying about the sharing of this knowledge as a survival strategy, the terror was made real only when I journeyed from the black side of town to a predominantly white area near my grandmother’s house. I had to pass through this area to reach her place. Oh! that feeling of safety, of arrival, of homecoming when we finally reached the edges of her yard, when we could see the soot black face of our grandfather, Daddy Gus, sitting in his chair on the porch, smell his cigar, and rest on his lap. Such a contrast, that feeling of arrival, of homecoming-this sweetness and the bitterness of that journey, that constant reminder of white power and control. Even though it was a long time ago that I made this journey, associations of whiteness with terror and the terrorising remain. Even though I live and move in spaces where I am surrounded by whiteness, there is no comfort that makes the terrorism disappear. All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorised by whiteness. (hooks, 1992: 177; see also hooks, 1990)

There are several reasons for quoting from hooks at length here, particularly given the force with which she shows the implicatedness of public space and its codings in the issue of ‘who is really a citizen?’ (the question of who is able to emerge from the mix of social-cultural relations and spatial configurations to be, and to feel themselves to be, truly a citizen). In addition the quotation hints at certain localized solutions to their plight which can be adopted by non-citizens, notably the tendency to avoid the public spaces where ‘proper’ citizens go and instead to seek and to carve out safe havens away from the ‘terrorism’ of such spaces. In hooks’s case these ‘homes’ entailed her grandparents’ house and then the black neighbourhoods containing this house and also her own, and the implication is that these houses and neighbourhoods were rather more to her than ‘just’ sites of belonging, they were also sites where black people could escape from the antagonism, anger and attacks which arose when they trespassed on white space (however legitimate in legal terms their presence in this white space would actually be). In other words, hooks indicates something of how black people can never be citizens confidently

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occupying the spaces of white society, but hints too at how they may find ways of trying to foster alternative locales in which some sense of being a citizen-this time of a distinctively black world-is made possible. And such resistance through spatial tactics is clearly evidenced by many other human groups in other circumstances, the objective again being to foster safe havens-however tenuous these may be in occupying tiny stretches of space, perhaps only for fleeting moments of time, and in being connected together by fragile networks of friends, word of mouth and local knowledge-wherein a quite ‘other’ kind of citizenship can be fostered (what might even be termed ‘a citizenship of the non-citizens’). This means that a variety of different groups such as gays, homeless people and ex-mental patients are effectively forced into a sort of ‘underground geography, giving the group members a series of spaces in which they can enjoy something like citizenship status but as tbmelves and not as some ‘distorted’ version of themselves (as happens when they try to follow the codes of conventional public space). These are spaces where they have rights and maybe also obligations in relation to other group members, but where there is no political relation to an institutionalized supra-individual entity, except in the sense of occasionally mounting campaigns from within these ‘underground’ geographies to challenge the state and its practices in relation to minorities. It might be added at this point that campaigns of this latter sort can even involve the demand for rights to be guaranteed by the state on the grounds that there should be equality and dignity for all of a state’s ‘charges’, and in the process activists are strategically deploying the concept of citizenship as a lever to secure political gains at the same time as they are recasting the very terms of citizenship itself (see both Bell and Pile, this issue). Gay rights activism is perhaps the most obvious example from recent years of a movement operating through an ‘underground’ geography to claim citizenship rights and at the same time to trouble conventional notions of citizenship-think of British gays campaigning for a lowering of the age of consent to give them parity with heterosexuals; think of Vancouver’s gays increasingly forging a coherent sector of the city’s ‘shadow state’ around questions of AIDS treatment and education (Brown, 1994)-but the gay experience is only the tip of an iceberg of possibilities. Indeed, this iceberg includes ostensibly more humdrum experiences such as those of ME sufferers organizing small self-help groups in rural West Wales (Ma&an, 1993), or those of limited-equity housing cooperatives in New York City where low-income black women are working in both symbolic and political registers to stake out the lines of a new participatory citizenship (Clark, 1994). Revealingly in this latter case, Helene Clark talks about the formation of networks bringing together different sets of residents based in different blocks of housing, and in one small instance

she describes

how:

efforts are centred on appropriating a space. In one neighbourhood, it is a vacant lot which they hope to gain control of and turn into a community garden. In another, it is to provide awnings for each cooperative in the area. While awnings seem like a minor issue for neighbourhoods plagued by horriftc drug problems, crime, joblessness and lack of services, their symbolic and political value is enormous. (Clark, 1994: np.) Clark reflects theoretically on this process of ‘appropriating a space’, drawing on the ideas of Iris Marion Young (1990), and she proposes that the networks described here open up a ‘discursive public’-a ‘counter public’ or, better, a collection of ‘counter publics’comprising ‘a place to contest’ the conventional assumptions of the hegemonic ‘larger public’ (Clark, 1994). With Clark and others we are hence led to think carefully about the

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plethora of sites and networks within those ‘underground geographies that we mentioned earlier, embracing both material spaces of interaction and organizing and more intangible spaces of communication and imagination, and we would suggest that these geographies might be represented as really quite ‘other’ spaces of citizenship to those usually examined by academics concerned with citizenship. Several contributions to this issue, but notably Bell and Pile, strike us as talking about precisely these ‘other’ geographies of citizenship-a citizenship ‘on the margins’ yet troubling ‘to the centre’-and in so doing they are making a provocative step out of social-cultural geography to demonstrate important new phenomena demanding a response in the studies of political geographers (and not just from those who are thinking specifically about citizenship).

The contributions

to this issue

This brief sketch of the spaces of citizenship provides a rough framework in which to situate the writings of the four main contributors to this issue. We have indicated that the geography of citizenship is complex, cut across by social, cultural and political distinctions both within and between political communities. Who counts as a citizen depends on relations not only with others outside‘our’ space but also with others withinit. We have no wish to impose this intersection of internal and external relations as a rigid template for analysing the connections between geography and citizenship; all the authors assembled here have developed their own distinctive approaches. However, each of the following papers picks up on these themes in its own way. In her consideration of contemporary European developments, Eleonore Kofman discusses the ways in which contemporary western models of citizenship implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) marginalize others within and without the territories of nation-states. Of particular concern are the implications for groups that express a ‘non-conforming territoriality’ and for women. Current moves within (and indeed by) the European Union to more diversified spaces of governance lead Kofman to speculate about both the threats and the opportunities for presently excluded groups in the ‘New Europe’. David Bell’s contribution focuses on the relationship between citizenship and sexuality. Bell’s main concern is with those (such as lesbians, gay men and sado-masochists) who are labelled (or who label themselves) as sexual dissidents. Through a consideration of, among other things, the response of both state and ‘citizen-pervert’ to a specific legal action (the Operation Spanner case in Britain), Bell shows how the disruption of the private spaces of sexuality by the state has prompted a disruption of the public spaces of citizenship by those whom the state condemns. The papers by Ade Kearns and Nick Fyfe also consider developments in Britain, and both are concerned with sets of changes introduced by the ruling Conservative government. Kearns looks at the assimilation of the discourse of citizenship within the restructuring of local government. He asks whether the emergence of the idea of the ‘active citizen’ and the turn away at the local level from the formal structures of government towards a more institutionally diverse local governance has the potential to lead to a more participatory democracy. A key issue is the extent to which novel forms of political activity and intervention can provide access for groups previously excluded from the political process. Kearns concludes that this potential will depend in part on the character of the diverse places that provide its contexts. Changes in public order legislation and policing are considered by Fyfe. He notes that the thinking of the New Eight, which has informed British government policy on a range of issues, is a contradictory combination of neo-liberal and neo-conservative ideas. A

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simultaneous stress on individualism and self-reliance, on the one hand, and a strong role for the state, on the other, has generated some paradoxical refigurings of the spaces of citizenship. One set of initiatives seeks to transfer some responsibility for policing from the state to civil society, while another seeks to open up the public and private spaces of civil society to the scrutiny and regulation of the state. Fyfe’s arguments demonstrate how this contradictory shifting of the boundary of state and civil society both generates and depends on geographical, as well as political, changes.

Acknowledgements issue would not have been possible without the enthusiasm and support of all those who spoke at and participated in the joint special session on ‘Spaces of Citizenship’ sponsored by the Institute of British Geographers’ Political Geography and Social and Cultural Geography Study Groups. We would particularly like to thank our co-conveners, Eleonore Kofman and Steve Pile, for helping to make that event such a success. In addition, we would like to thank Phil Crang and Hester

This special

Parr for helpful

suggestions

complementary

issue of Environment and Pkznning A on citizenship,

and Sallie Marston

for kindly

allowing

us to see the manuscripts which

she has edited

of a

with Lynn

Staeheli.

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