City-zens of the Middle East:

 

Human Rights in the Urban Metropolis

 

(Part I)

 

By Hana Salama

 

 

 

Introduction

        A growing concern among scholars of urbanization has been the rise of private spaces in the cities.  These range from quasi-public spaces such as malls and business centers to completely private fortified enclaves sometimes referred to gated communities, which are often accompanied by privatized security to "protect" these spaces and ensure their exclusivity. Contemporary literature about privatization both of space and security in the modern/post-modern city is concerned with a range of different topics from urban planning, the distribution of public goods and services, societal segregation, local governance and citizenship. Ultimately, however, “it is a discussion about what type of society we would like to live in” (Glasze, Chris, & Frantz, 2006, p. 1).  This “trend” of privatization of public space in the city has been a global trend, and accordingly has been essentialized as an “effect” of neo-liberal globalization. Recognizing that the privatization of public space is partly due to economic and cultural globalization which are global forces affecting all major cities in the world to different degrees, the process and extent by which cities have experienced this type of privatization needs to placed in a historically and culturally-specific contexts. The scholarship on Middle Eastern cities lacks, among many other things, an analysis which consolidates both global and local forces of globalization and situates the privatization of public space in local as well as global institutions. When it comes to urban studies in the Middle East, “cites have been essentialized in an Orientalist discussion of traditional organization of cities and Islam” (Shechter & Yacobi, 2002, p. 183). The study of cities in the Middle East has rarely included a socio-political analysis of such trends such as privatization of public space like in the Western scholarship of “global cities” and a rarely placed in their regional context. The general lack of scholarship on Middle Eastern and North African cities also is surprising, given the large and ongoing interest in regional geo-politics (Ibid).  There has been recent interest in the study of urbanization in the Middle East to apply well established theories such Social network analysis, which are routinely applied to global cities of the west, there has been little interest in the significance of citizenship at the level of the city in the Middle East. The purpose of this essay is to address this gap in the literature by studying the effect and causes of privatization on the spatial and societal organization of cities in the Middle East. In order to address the societal impact of privatization the concept of urban citizenship and the right to the city will be applied as a theoretical basis for understanding urban public life in Middle Eastern cities, a concept which is often used in the socio-political analysis of western cities, rarely in with their eastern counterparts. More specifically the phenomenon of Gated communities will be the main example of privatization of public space, and its impact on public life and urban citizenship. Gated communities in Lebanon and Cairo will be used as a comparative example. Privatization of public space as part of the globalization process as defined by the global flows of capital, culture and people, has simultaneously provided an opportunity for a new type of governance  articulated by a sub-national citizenship and has narrowed the space in which this new citizenship can be fulfilled (Caldeira, 2000; Sassen, 1999).  The aim of this essay is not to downplay the negative effects of  Privatization in the city, however it is to explore how the forces behind privatization  of public space are re-shaping the concept of citizenship by challenging and reaffirming rights claims to the city , whether they are citizens in the traditional sense of the word or not. This is an important, yet understudied, facet of both the study of socio-economic rights  and the study of urbanization, as the city becomes the” new unit of analysis” for economic and cultural globalization and the claim to human rights becomes increasingly unbounded by national boundaries and claims transnational space (Sassen, 2000, p. 50). In the Middle East there has not yet been a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of weather there has been a   widening opportunity for urban citizenship based on of the so called “transnationalization” of people and social movements in the city, which is beyond the scope of this paper rather the purpose is to explore this possibility by situating middle eastern cities in their global, regional and local contextual narratives.

Some open public spaces remain unimpeded by the neo-liberalization of global urban planning
schemes such as this busy intersection in Tahrir Square, downtown Cairo (courtesy of dickmendezidi)

Cities: Spaces for Urban Citizens

This section looks at the theoretical basis for claiming an Urban Citizenship by looking at the concept of what is traditionally known as “National Citizenship.” There has been a significant body of literature on alternative types of citizenship which is based on a global identity rather than a national one, however these currently are not well suited to account for local identities derived from the day to day experience of the city and more specifically rights claim to the city. Urban citizenship is a manifestation of what globalization scholars such as Saskia Sassen and James Holston call “New Politics” and “New identities” which are not limited to the territorial boundaries of the nation state. From the perspective of New Politics which is characterized by the multiplicity of changing identities we will discover in what capacity this space for new politics has taken place in Middle Eastern cities.

 

Understanding Urban Citizenship

The starting point for the concept of Urban citizenship, lies in the institutional and historical process which has shaped the more commonly known and widespread notion of National Citizenship. From the legal-rational perspective Citizenship is delineated by national a boundary which includes rights and responsibilities parted on both the individual and the state. From this perspective Citizenship is a legal category of a persons (Rocco, 2000, p. 218). In other words an individual can be classified as a citizen, non-citizen, migrant or illegal person based on pre-determined attributes which may fall commonly under ethnicity, race, religion, place of birth, political identity, legal status, etc.  This however is a rather static and superficial conception of citizenship and does not offer any explanation in the way in which citizenship is practiced in day to day life. M.R Somers and K McClure use an institutional framework  which can  define  citizenship  by “Organizational  and symbolic  practices that operate  within networks  of rules, structural ties, public narratives,  and binding relationships that are embedded  in time and space” (p. 219). Thus citizenship is created by institutional a process which is historically and culturally specific.  Social categories such as class, race ethnicity or religion, assume a more rigid behaviour and interaction, thus with regards to citizenship we cannot look exclusively at social categories rather it is more beneficial to study identity, as being constructed through a set of practices behaviour located in a “national” narrative, which have the potential to become a source of political action (p. 220). Somers argue that that identity will eventually turn into a “rights based positive citizenship identity” given the right contexts of activation, which is often associated with a democratic system; Somers however chooses to identify this context as a popular public sphere and associational practices (p. 219).  For the case of privatization of public spaces in the city, both the public sphere and associational practices are being challenged,  which  presents a challenge to the  concept of rights and citizenship which is the topic of this paper and will be discussed in depth in a later section. 

 

New Urban Citizenship and Rights Claims

Even though McClure, Somers and R Rocco agree that “an understanding of Citizenship must be grounded in historical and institutional relationships” (p. 220), rights claims are becoming detached from the nation-state and the associated institutional relationships between citizens and the state. This has been attributed to a number of things but chief among them is the changing of nature of the “subject of rights.”  The subject of rights is the rights bearer, also known as the citizen, has historically been constituted through “a dialogue of modern constitutionalism limited by historical and geo political conditions” (p. 220).   However this process has been displaced by a new processes and practices in which new social actors emerge with “a range of diverse and contradictory localist and transnational constructs which are in many ways contrary to the centralized notion of the state and statist codification of legal discourse” (Ibid). That is to say those “new” rights claims are based on other criteria challenging the traditional notion of identity, subject and agency. Somers and Saskia Sassen argue that he forces behind this change is closely related to transnational movements. While this may be the case, these claims are shaped by new spaces and institutional practices with in a territorial boundary  which is a reason why urban citizenship  scholars such as Bounds and Beauregard argue that there is still “a need for a strong place-based affiliation” (Beauregard & Bounds, 2000, p. 244) This place-based affiliation of new rights claims must be either  below the state or above it because of the contradictory nature of the new rights claims to the statist-legal approach. Transnational movements fueled by new rights claims have often been seen in human rights literature to be above the state suggesting the idea of some kind of global citizenship. However I argue in the line of bounds and Beauregard that the transnationalization process is constructing the basis for an urban citizenship because citizenship needs a place-based affiliation and is constructed through institutional and historical practices that has both political and Cultural meaning (p. 243). New rights claims constitute a variety of different claims such as the environment, rights of the worker and sexual rights which find their narratives and practices located in the city. New rights claims are also associated with the right or rights to the city itself which was first developed by Henri Lefebvre a French Marxist writer.  Henri Lefebvre proclaimed the ‘right to the city’, a right to become a city-zens in the material and political sense.  The right to the city includes access to a set of material and immaterial citizen’s rights, including rights to affordable housing and basic services, sustainable livelihoods, health and education, mobility in order to realize all these, and participation in decisions that affect people’s lives. (Lefebvre, 2002) The right to the city is a highly contested as there is no legal framework for these sets of rights with the exception of national frameworks which aim to protect socio-economic rights. The difficulty in ensuring socio-economic rights at a national level let alone at a city level is aggravated by a lack of resources and political will to ensure such extensive rights by the public authority. The right to mobility which is the right to access public spaces in the city is obviously curtailed and challenged by the wave of privatization of public space. As it is the key right to realize all the other rights  the privatization of public space in the city becomes more than just a limit on city-zens mobility it impedes on all other rights and prevents a full realization of urban citizenship. In addition to weal public authority urban elites present another challenge to the right to the city  because they are the main  source of demand of privatization of space which feeds in to their fear of the” other” in the  city  particularly dangerous newcomers that distinguished by different nationality, ethnicity or creed brought on by economic globalization. Ensuring rights to the city which are socio-economic rights which in theory should be ensured by the nation-state will need a set of institutional practices and framework which urban citizenship claims to have.

 

 

On Rights and Responsibilities

     Urban citizenship is two folds, the first aspect is that it recognizes those who are being marginalized and recognizes and the second aspect is that everyone should have a right to the city or maintain a minimum lifestyle within the city.  Urban citizenship  can be defined as an affiliation to the city which is not based on the national-legal criteria of citizenship rather on the rights claims of any individual which takes part in practices and activities whether economic, cultural, political or associational within the city relating to either or both the local or global sphere of activity. This definition attempts to encompass all activities and individuals in the city however in order to take the concept of Urban citizenship into practice it must be accompanied by a discussion on the rights and responsibilities associated with urban citizenship.  Urban citizenship has been chosen as the preferred alternative citizenship among other forms of alternative citizenships such as cosmopolitan citizenship and transnational citizenship. Cosmopolitan citizenship is based on an obligation towards humanity, especially vulnerable and marginalized groups which transcend the borders of nation states (Linklater, 1998). Transnational citizenship which is similar to cosmopolitan citizenship but requires the nation-states to recognize more than one type of citizenship. According to Bounds and Beauregard these formulation of citizenships are problematic in the sense that they further threaten the authority of the nation state by attenuating national commitments to socio-economic rights. More significantly these types of citizenship cannot deal with group based rights claims as they are too individually based. Even if they claim a departure from national citizenship based on the legal-rational conception they are still based on individual rights claim and can difficulty deal with group based rights claim. Along with socio-economic rights group based rights or collective rights are not only  recognized as  third generation  human rights they  are also an essential part of social life hence form  the basis of urban citizenship  (Beauregard & Bounds, 2000, p. 246).

                The spatial and conceptual boundary of what constitutes “the city” is supposed to be part of the public sphere. The public sphere is defined by xx  as a space where city-zens come together for a variety of different reasons to partake in  public and social life, thus as mentioned before the concept of urban citizenship  relates to both the accessibility to the  public sphere and  ability to make associational rights claims or group based rights claims . According to Engin F Isin, a scholar on this subject, Urban Citizenship needs to identify a group for which is citizenship is central to its rights struggle (Beauregard & Bounds, 2000, p. 247). Isin suggests that the professional class could be that group because they participate in social, political and economic spaces of the city .However this is rather limiting given the multiplicity of groups and identity which exists in the city. Urban citizenship is meant to fill a gap between citizenship status and substantive citizenship as well as be a framework of citizenship for those who have been marginalized by the statist conception of citizenship. According to Bounds and Beauregard, urban Citizenship cannot solely be located within local government because often local or city governments are reduced to service delivery and citizens are reduced to clients. Thus urban citizenship is located between the city and the state but is not independent of either. As discussed before, the right to the city can essentially be classified as social rights to governance and access to public space in order to nurture public life promote dialogue between citizens and prevent crime and segregation. In accordance to this Bounds and Beauregard suggest five anchors to Urban Citizenship which impart rights and responsibility both to the citizen and the local authority, those being; personal and group safety; freedom; tolerance; right to political participation and the right to recognition. The most important ones are personal and group safety as well as freedom. Personal and group safety also known as the right to security is a minimum condition to fulfill the rest of the rights and responsibility of urban citizenship. It is essential because when the feeling on insecurity in the city rises, citizenship is diminished as people seek to secure themselves through other means.  The elites will segregate themselves in fortified enclaves for the purposes of security, leaving the city and making public spaces more insecure. The low-wage labor class will lose trust in the civil police and secure themselves through other means which contributes to the insecurity (Caldeira, 2000). The right to safety is both a right and a responsibility shared by  the citizens and local government because local government must provide a efficient and uncorrupt police force and citizens must occupy public spaces, because” the potential for violence and criminal behavior is diminished when public spaces are vibrant with people” (Beauregard & Bounds, 2000, p. 250). Freedom or more specifically freedom from intrusion of commercial and political manipulation also constitutes a minimal condition because without it citizen cannot express themselves, or have the choice to participate in the political realm. This rights and responsibility framework is still very idealistic and the space for its realization is being simultaneously widened and narrowed by globalization forces.

 

New Politics and Identities in Middle Eastern Cities

Academic discussions of citizenship in the Middle East have often revolved around arguments about the lack of citizenship and citizenship rights.  This is partly due to the orientalist scholarship on the Middle East in the modernization period which argued that “city-states in the Middle East lacked a concept of and status of citizenship” (Isin E. F., 2001, p. 343). Orientalism, as studied by Edward Said and Bryan turner is seen as the outlook or discipline by which western European and American societies and scholars have “otherized” Eastern cultures based on culture or religion, making it inferior to the west and subordinate. The leader in orientalist scholarship of cities and citizenship in the Middle East was Max Weber, who found that both the internal logic of Islam and the lack of progress due to the absence of a capitalist economy prevented associational solidarities, thus any concept of citizenship. He attributed this “finding” mostly to the characteristic of Islam a religion which prevented by its nature association of people because it emphasized clans and kinships (Isin E. F., 2001, p. 353) Moreover he saw that persistent theocratic rule in Middle Eastern countries would prevent the emergence of citizenship in the Middle East and oriental cultures.  Weber and most authors at the time saw citizenship as a distinct value and character of occidental societies. This is the common theoretical stance which democracy scholars such as Michael Young take by saying that full citizenship can only be fulfilled in a condition of democracy and that there is an inherent incompatibility with Islam and democracy. Isin label this as neo-orientalist a revival of orientalist discourse which is prevalent in discussions of Democracy in the Middle East. However the basis of assuming an incompatibility with democracy and Islam but contradicts the earlier orientalist assumptions that middle eastern societies cannot allow for citizenship because they are not associational enough while neo-orientalist blame the lack of democratic citizenship on the communal character of Eastern societies which put more emphasis on the group rather than individual (Isin E. F., 2001, p. 367). This contradiction is enough to move away from an orientalist perspective on citizenship in the Middle East and treat it as a global-region which has unique citizenship practices that are being changed and challenged by cultural and economic globalization just like any other global-region. Thus just like other global-region using the city as a common ground for urban citizenship is more valid that ever in the Middle East, however differences on how urban citizenship is expressed is attributed to the cultural and historical institutions in the region.

Another argument for viewing the city as the main place base affiliation of transnational movements is Saskia Sassen’s argument about the “denationalization of cities” which is a process by which transnational movements and economic activity is undermining state authority and thus strengthening the city. Sassen notes among other movements that “the International Human Rights movement  undermines the state’s exclusive authority  over its nationals because  it entitles individuals to make claims on grounds that are not derived from the authority of the state,” (Sassen, 2000, p. 53) rather rights claims are derived from international human rights instruments and transnational movements. While this may be the case, Sassen makes an even more convincing argument for urban citizenship by describing the city as the new unit of analysis for economic globalization.  This is because economic globalization has reconfigured economic spaces in the nation but more significantly in the city. It has altered social relations and had a differential impact on gender races and social class (Sassen, 2000, pp. 53-55). This process according to Sassen is making the city the place for “New politics” (p. 57). New politics is characterized by a perpetual process of marginality and centrality which places the low-income marginalized workers created by the division of labor geographically in the center of the city while the international urban elite seeks to migrate to the outer areas  of city for seclusion.  Hence urban violence can be seen by as way to make claims to the city and seek recognition, by those who were previously invisible. 

In the context of the Middle East we are not seeing a process of denationalization per se, where Middle Eastern cities are significantly independent from the national context. In fact even the most “global” of Middle Eastern cities such as Istanbul or Cairo are closely tied with the nation. This is due to historical institutional practices which were enacted during the emerging nation- state set to bolster their capital cities through large investments in the public sector. Urban planning, in the rise of the Middle Eastern nation- state represented a symbolic spatial and political intervention (Shechter & Yacobi, 2002, pp. 183-184). Capital cities such as Cairo became a reflection of their charismatic leaders. In Lebanon, urban planning was and is still seen as “a positivistic tool to organize resources and balance between different interests” (Glasze, 2006, p. 141). Thus even today cities in the Middle East are historically bound to these modes of practices in urban planning and the perception of the city which arises from these practices the “heart of the nation.”  However, institutional and global economic factors are slowly changing this perceived identity of the Middle Eastern city consistent, to a certain degree to Sassen’s denationalization process. The first factor of this changing perception by city dwellers in the Middle East are that the new perception of the state abandoning the city. In Cairo this started during the regional economic crisis of the 1980’s and 1990’s where there was a devaluation in wages of the public sector and increased privatization of public goods which caused economic hardships for most middle class city dwellers. The second factor is the politics of marginality and centrality in the city driven by privatization and other global forces.  In many middle eastern cities rather than urban violence, the reaction to this marginalization is the large scale informal sector which Nezar Alsayyad  calls Urban informality, where by the state is no longer able to provide services in the city and the local authority is significantly weakened. This is expressed in the form of large areas of informal settlements and an informal economy (Alsayyad, 2003). Thus with an erosion of the governments capacity to provide for its people the potential for informal transnational networks is increased which can allow for more regional and global cooperation,  this can provide more agency for inhabitants empowering their relations with the state (Shechter & Yacobi, 2002, p. 191).  In Middle Eastern cities these empowering relations with the state means  claiming rights to the city and making new rights claim which are not based on national citizenship( which in some Middle Eastern countries is rather limited in scope) but on their position in the urban economy.  This is precisely the new politics and new formations of identities that Sassen refers to. However it would be misleading to attribute these new politics exclusively to global forces. Rather it is more accurate to say that historical and cultural institutions in the Middle East   are reacting to global forces, thus shaping new identities and politics. In the Middle East “Cityscapes are at the very core of contemporary public discourse on past present and future national agendas as a corollary debate on globalization” (Shechter & Yacobi, 2002, p. 186). Focusing on cities particularly in the Middle East allows capturing the upper and lower circuits of globalization affecting individuals and groups which are changing the nature of socio-political activity in the city. 
 

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Hana Salama graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in International Development and Globalization from the University of Ottawa and a Master of Science in Human Rights from the London School of Economics (LSE). This three-part series of articles are based on her dissertation research on citizenship in the Middle Eastern urban setting. Her email is hana.salama@gmail.com

 

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