ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on contemporary processes of claiming and expanding rights at the local level. Conceptually, we turn to the literature on urban citizenship since it allows us to bring together perspectives on rights, resources and recognition as well as on urban social movements. It explores how citizenship has been shaped by shifting political constellations and changing relationships between various actors over the past three decades. The chapter presents three short case studies from the fields of housing and (im)migration—which have turned out to be particularly contested in recent years—in order to investigate processes of resisting neo-liberalisation in more detail. For this purpose, it proposes to differentiate between three modes of expanding citizenship at the urban scale: claiming citizenship and social rights from below, top-down provisions of rights through governmental and administrative action, and ‘doing citizenship’ through residents’ social practices and daily routines.
