ABSTRACT
As the previous chapters have discussed, for the state to effectively govern society it needs to break down its territory into smaller geographical units and to operate through a hierarchy of local and regional governments and agencies. In a democracy, the offices and institutions of the ‘local state’ are not appointed agents of the central state installed to impose the state’s diktat on the local population, but rather they are democratic institutions in their own right, accountable to local citizens and offering opportunities for participation, either through elections or through forms of direct engagement and active citizenship. Indeed, there has historically been a close association between ‘the city’, citizenship and democracy. The word ‘citizenship’ is etymologically connected to the Latin word for city, civitas, and the concept of citizenship implying not only a sense of belonging to a city, but also a set of rights and responsibilities exercised at the scale of the city evolved in the ancient city-states of Greece and Rome and the self-governing cities of mediaeval Europe (Isin 2002). In modern times, citizenship came to be more commonly associated with the nation-state and with the legal codification of rights and responsibilities in relation to the state (see Box 4.1); however, it can be argued that the contemporary restructuring and rescaling of the state discussed in Chapter 3 is once again shifting more emphasis on to how citizenship is constructed and practised at a local level. Accordingly, geographers such as Lynn Staeheli (2011) have proposed that research should focus less on categories and definitions of citizenship and more on questions about how citizenship is constructed and contested, and the sites through which citizenship formation takes place (see also Desforges et al. 2005; Kurtz and Hankins 2005).
