10 - Postmodern Citizenship

Summary

Chapter 10 introduces the “postmodern” conception of local citizenship. On this view, the city is a “fortuitous association” where people come together in all of their differences, and where members of marginalized groups exercise a form of citizenship by appearing in public and challenging their formal exclusion from political power. Unlike the republican idea, postmodern citizenship rejects walls and rejects the idea that the city should isolate itself from the world; it is open and borderless. Yet, for that very reason, postmodern citizenship is necessarily fragile and ephemeral. A borderless city risks diluting the normative subgroups that make it possible to tolerate the impersonality and anonymity of the city; if they lose their ability to withdraw into their subgroups, people may flee the city entirely for ethnically and racially homogenous suburbs.