Citizenship and Urban Infrastructures: The State, Non-State Mediations and Everyday Practices

This article introduces a Special Issue on “Citizenship and Urban Infrastructures: The State, Non-State Mediations and Everyday Practices”, which brings together contributions that critically examine how infrastructures shape, mediate, and complicate the formation of citizenship. Building on current debates that move beyond normative and legal definitions of citizenship, this Special Issue expands these discussions by examining the varied roles infrastructures play in the interplay between state and non-state actors, material arrangements, and everyday practices. Drawing on empirical cases from cities in Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia, the articles explore how infrastructures - from transport and sanitation systems to digital identification technologies - mediate citizenship through daily interactions. The diversity of contexts reveals important conceptual variations in how infrastructure and citizenship intersect, shaped by differing political conditions, historical trajectories, and spatial configurations.

Across the articles, citizenship emerges as multiple and contingent, shaped by diverse contexts. Infrastructures appear variously: as instruments of the state used to promote both inclusion and exclusion, and to enforce norms of belonging and governmentality; as systems appropriated by non-state actors to assert political power and create alternative political spaces; and as arenas through which rights are claimed and contested. Moreover, the Special Issue calls for examining citizenship formation across multiple spatial and temporal registers—attending to historical trajectories, and the everyday temporalities through which infrastructural governance is experienced and negotiated. This introduction concludes by outlining three directions for future research: (1) comparative analysis that engages with diverse sociopolitical and material conditions; (2) critical explorations of the politics of everyday infrastructural practices as sites where citizenship is enacted; and (3) sustained attention to the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of infrastructures as constitutive of both governance and political subjectivity.