Cities and Citizenship is a prize-winning collection of essays that considers the importance of cities in the making of modern citizens. For most of the modern era the nation and not the city has been the principal domain of citizenship. This volume demonstrates, however, that cities are especially salient sites for examining the current renegotiations of citizenship, democracy, and national belonging.
Just as relations between nations are changing in the current phase of global capitalism, so too are relations between nations and cities. Written by internationally prominent scholars, the essays in Cities and Citizenship propose that “place” remains fundamental to these changes and that cities are crucial places for the development of new alignments of local and global identity. Through case studies from Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America, the volume shows how cities make manifest national and transnational realignments of citizenship and how they generate new possibilities for democratic politics that transform people as citizens. Previously published as a special issue of Public Culture that won the 1996 Best Single Issue of a Journal Award from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers, the collection showcases a photo essay by Cristiano Mascaro, as well as two new essays by James Holston and Thomas Bender.
Cities and Citizenship will interest students and scholars of anthropology, geography, sociology, planning, and urban studies, as well as globalization and political science.

Contributors. Arjun Appadurai, Etienne Balibar, Thomas Bender, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Mamadou Diouf, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, James Holston, Marco Jacquemet, Christopher Kamrath, Cristiano Mascaro, Saskia Sassen, Michael Watts, Michel Wieviorka

In City/Art, anthropologists, literary and cultural critics, a philosopher, and an architect explore how creative practices continually reconstruct the urban scene in Latin America. The contributors, all Latin Americanists, describe how creativity—broadly conceived to encompass urban design, museums, graffiti, film, music, literature, architecture, performance art, and more—combines with nationalist rhetoric and historical discourse to define Latin American cities. Taken together, the essays model different ways of approaching Latin America’s urban centers not only as places that inspire and house creative practices but also as ongoing collective creative endeavors themselves. The essays range from an examination of how differences of scale and point of view affect people’s experience of everyday life in Mexico City to a reflection on the transformation of a prison into a shopping mall in Uruguay, and from an analysis of Buenos Aires’s preoccupation with its own status and cultural identity to a consideration of what Miami means to Cubans in the United States.

Contributors delve into the aspirations embodied in the modernist urbanism of Brasília and the work of Lotty Rosenfeld, a Santiago performance artist who addresses the intersections of art, urban landscapes, and daily life. One author assesses the political possibilities of public art through an analysis of subway-station mosaics and Julio Cortázar’s short story “Graffiti,” while others look at the representation of Buenos Aires as a “Jewish elsewhere” in twentieth-century fiction and at two different responses to urban crisis in Rio de Janeiro. The collection closes with an essay by a member of the São Paulo urban intervention group Arte/Cidade, which invades office buildings, de-industrialized sites, and other vacant areas to install collectively produced works of art. Like that group, City/Art provides original, alternative perspectives on specific urban sites so that they can be seen anew.

Contributors. Hugo Achugar, Rebecca E. Biron, Nelson Brissac Peixoto, Néstor García Canclini, Adrián Gorelik, James Holston, Amy Kaminsky, Samuel Neal Lockhart, José Quiroga, Nelly Richard, Marcy Schwartz, George Yúdice

The utopian design and organization of Brasília—the modernist new capital of Brazil—were meant to transform Brazilian society. In this sophisticated, pioneering study of Brasília from its inception in 1957 to the present, James Holston analyzes this attempt to change society by building a new kind of city and the ways in which the paradoxes of constructing an imagined future subvert its utopian premises. Integrating anthropology with methods of analysis from architecture, urban studies, social history, and critical theory, Holston presents a critique of modernism based on a powerfully innovative ethnography of the city.