The growth in volume and intensity of cross-border mobility has significantly challenged the territorial foundation of national affiliation, giving rise to new forms of citizenship, scales and spaces at which they arise, and actors which (dis)claim them.

This seminar aims to focus on some recent developments in the interplay between migration, urban space and citizenship and examines the ways in which they are mutually constituted. Special attention will be paid to cities as crucial sites for conflicts over rights, recognition and belonging in post-migrational and super-diverse societies. The role of migration within processes of capitalist urbanization will be jointly explored. The seminar will introduce students to fundamental ideas in national migration, citizenship policies and urban policies tackling public spaces. It aims at exploring the emergence of alternative forms of citizenship, including diasporic and urban, and examines the growing neoliberalization of migration regimes, manifested through the increasing involvement of non-state actors in the process. The role of counter movements such as social non-movements, feminist housing movements, activists pursuing anti-politics or alter politics and human rights performers within these processes of (neoliberalized) governance of migration will be discussed.

The course is divided into three intensive teaching blocks (ITBs), each centering on a key thematic issue as follows:

ITB1 (October 1-5, 2018) – The Fundamentals of Migration Policy and of Public Space Policy – will introduce students to the basic ideas and concepts in the field.

ITB2 (December 3-7, 2018) – New Migration and Citizenship Regimes in the context of Post-Migrational Perspectives and Post-Political Thought – will introduce students to the changing faces of migration and citizenship governance in different countries, including non-state actors, sites of claim-making, and acts of resistance.

ITB3 (January 21-25, 2019) – The Right to the City: Urban Citizenship and Post-Colonial Debates – will introduce students to the ways in which cities are used to formulate, (re)claim and (re)define collective rights of communities with a particular emphasis on the rights of marginalized groups.    

Themes of the seminar, therefore, will include:

Introduction: Postmigrational perspectives on urbanization (unit 0, Nir Cohen, Sabine Knierbein and Angelika Gabauer)

After students have been volunteering online for topics in groups of two already via a Google Docs (Link) ideally until 26^th September 2018 (1pm), this first seminar unit serves as an introduction to the seminar work and an explanation about the team-based dialogical way to organize a seminar in a different formats. Each group will choose a seminar unit topic and prepare a 15minutes visual presentation and a position paper (1 page, containing core thesis of the texts and a positioned comment by the students) on selected texts, resulting in three questions for further discussion. While students have already started to snooze into these documents before this seminar kick-off meeting, instructors will offer help and supportive questions to those groups that will present in one of the next units. Therefore, we will reserve the last 15minutes of each seminar unit for those groups presenting in one of the next units to briefly talk through their ideas and questions and clarify their doubts.

ITB1- The Fundamentals of Migration Policy and of Public Space Policy

Policies of Migration: From government to governance (unit 1, Nir Cohen)

The past two decades have seen a growing interest in the role of non-state actors (NSAs) in governing processes. From environmental to human rights issues, private and civic actors have gradually become part and parcel of (un)making and regulating public policies at the local, national and global scales. Common explanations for this shift from state (or state-led) governments to governance often mobilize Foucault’s notion of governmentality. The increasing reliance on governance, the argument goes, reflects statist aspirations to ‘govern at a distance’ by engaging a wide array of civil society actors. In the field of migration, the dislocation of state intervention has presented new and lucrative opportunities for new non-state actors, increasing their involvement in the provision of a range of mobility-related services. From detention of the undocumented to recruitment of the highly-skilled, private and civic forces are now intimately entangled in enabling – or disabling - cross-border mobility. In this session we will explore some of the key reasons – and effects – of this policy transformation, and discuss the implications of the shift from government to governance in migration policy-making.

Public Space and Planning as Governmentality (unit 2, Sabine Knierbein)

This unit connects to the lecture unit (2) on urban restructuring, public space and the contemporary city. It will offer an introduction into different lenses of how the emergence of post-positivist planning can be understood when focusing on its genealogy.

Governing Migration through Networks: Migration Industries and beyond (unit 3, Nir Cohen)

Migration Industry (MI) has recently emerged as a new research field as well as a key lens through which to theorize the rising commercialization and privatization of practices and processes that mediate international migration. Many of them, such as operation of detention facilities or recruitment of migrant labor, have been outsourced by states to private actors in past decades. Simultaneously, new types of migration-mediating practices and markets have emerged as a result of the rise to dominance of the migration management/governance paradigm. This seminar unit will discuss the political economic structures that enabled the emergence of migration industries as a neoliberal instrument designated secure leaner, more efficient, and thus more flexible migration regimes.

ITB2 - New Migration and Citizenship Regimes in the context of Post-Migration Perspectives and Post-Political Thought

Embodied space and post-migration (unit 4, Sabine Knierbein)

While much of urban writing on the public and private space has been influenced by conceptions of space that built especially on the discursive construction of space, this unit will offer an entry perspective into conceptions of space that discuss social relations through aspects of body, performance and action. Recalling on Lefebvre’s urge to center praxis as any point of departure for further theoretical reflection, public space is thereby reconstituted as a sphere where praxis and theory meet, and where old-fashioned trenches in architecture and planning that seek to isolate practical from theoretical forms of generating knowledge shall be overcome. This strand of thought will be connected to post-migrant life strategies which pluralize daily life in contemporary cities.

States, Diaspora and the Politics of Citizenship (I): Theoretical Underpinnings  (unit 5, Nir Cohen)

One of the key manifestations of the shifting global political landscape is the growing quest for citizenship rights by groups beyond the sovereign territory of the state. Propelled by the exponential increase in both political transnationalism from below and states’ desire to maintain ties with their overseas populace, the de-coupling of territorial presence and citizenship rights challenges traditional models of (republican) citizenship and delineates new terms of engagement between political subjects and state institutions. In this lecture and the following one (N.4) we will explore the driving forces behind the changing relations between states and diasporas, paying particular attention to the emergence of diaspora strategies as key institutional mechanisms and the ways in which they redraw the boundaries of territorial citizenship in the global age.

Migration and the ‘Politics of Affect’ (unit 6, Angelika Gabauer)

By drawing on lecture unit 6 ‘Embodied Space: Politics of Affect and Performative Planning’, this seminar unit wants to further examine the concept of ‘politics of affect’ through contextualizing theories of affects and emotions within migration policies. In doing so, affect and emotion will be explored in relation to matters of state border protection, control of national security and management of ‘unwanted’ arrivals. Thus, the focus is on questions about how passions are mobilized in order to protect state sovereignty, how certain feelings, emotions and affects play a role in distinguishing between ‘insiders’ (state citizens) and ‘outsiders’ (immigrants, asylum seekers, ‘unwanted’ arrivals), how affects and emotions become powerful means in the regulation of border crossings? 

Enacting Citizenship and Performative Planning (unit 7, Angelika Gabauer)

Instead of approaching the concept of citizenship as a legal status (cf. jus sanguinis, jus soli and jus domicile), which means focusing on rights of citizens in a state, or as a (political) practice, which involves questions about political participation such as the right to vote, this unit aims at scrutinizing citizenship from a perspective of acting. Isin’s attempt to conceptualize citizenship as Enacting Citizenship perceives citizenship as ‘the right to claim rights’. Such an approach focuses on how people constitute themselves as political subjects rather than referring to already constituted orders. By drawing on performative planning approaches we will further investigate on how such a performative understanding of citizenship might open up new perspectives for the field of planning.

Public space and post-political thought (unit 8, Sabine Knierbein)
While rising urban inequality has characterized European Cities since the 1970s already, urban scholarship has dealt in different ways with developing analytical tools to unravel patterns of uneven spatial development and social inequality. While class-analysis has been criticized in the course of a growing individualist reorganization of (not exclusively) Western capitalist societies (e.g. Beck), more recent contributions from cultural sociology have reinstated class analysis and linked it back to the scholarship of (urban) inequality. On the other side, new ways forward have been sketched that heavily build on the notion of resistance for staging equality and egalitarian claims. The seminar will dive into these debates.

State, Diaspora and the Politics of Citizenship (II): Practical Issues (unit 9, Nir Cohen)

One of the key manifestations of the shifting global political landscape is the growing quest for citizenship rights by groups beyond the sovereign territory of the state. Propelled by the exponential increase in both political transnationalism from below and states’ desire to maintain ties with their overseas populace, the de-coupling of territorial presence and citizenship rights challenges traditional models of (republican) citizenship and delineates new terms of engagement between political subjects and state institutions. This seminar unit complements the previous one (N.3) in exploring the driving forces behind the changing relations between states and diasporas, paying particular attention to the emergence of diaspora strategies as key institutional mechanisms and the ways in which they redraw the boundaries of territorial citizenship in the global age. This unit will focus on the nature of interactions between states and their diasporas.

ITB3 - The Right to the City: Urban Citizenship and Post-Colonial Debates

Urban Agency, Citizenship and Civic innovation (unit 10, Henrik Lebuhn and Sabine Knierbein)

In recent years, city authorities and urban societies have developed different approaches to welcome and support newcomers in situations of emergency of manifest shifts in migratory paradigms (a) on an ad-hoc and humanitarian level and (b) in more institutional ways that render the urban as a renewed place of political polity. This seminar unit will feature case studies from (a) New York and (b) Vienna to highlight spatial and institutional practices that bear civic-innovative potential. It will also shed light on the emancipatory agency of those rendered as ‘refugees’ during the so-called March of Hope between Budapest and Vienna in 2015.

Ambivalence, Fragmentation, Polarization (unit 11, Nir Cohen and Henrik Lebuhn)

This seminar unit will deal with the political geography of globally expanding forms of urban informalities, the so-called ‘gray spaces’, between the ‘whiteness’ of legality/approval/safety, and the ‘blackness’ of eviction/destruction/death. The vast expansion of gray spaces in contemporary cities reflects the emergence of new types of colonial relations, which are managed by urban regimes facilitating a process of ‘creeping apartheid’. Planning is a lynchpin of this urban order, providing tools and technologies to classify, contain and manage deeply unequal urban societies. The author uses a ‘South-Eastern’ perspective to suggest the concept of ‘planning citizenship’ as a possible corrective horizon for analytical, normative and insurgent theories. A link addressing the right to the city of refugees and migrants in particular will be established to contemporary debates on ‘sanctuary cities’, their innovativeness and controversies.

Citizenship, Inclusion and Exclusion (unit 12, Angelika Gabauer)

This seminar unit will discuss the role of citizenship within processes of urban restructuring characterized by new governance arrangements, displacement and gentrification. We will discuss how citizenship issues define who is included and excluded, and how resistance practices particularly from (post)migrants get visible in the local, urban and regional spaces of contemporary cities.

Summary: Migration, Citizenship and Planning between States, Cities and Markets [Closing unit] (seminar 13, Nir Cohen, Sabine Knierbein and Angelika Gabauer)
The closing unit of the seminar series will help to draw connections between the different themes raised within the seminar, between the contents of the lecture and the seminar and the exercise and the seminar course. Students open questions can be articulated beforehand and will offer a fertile base for a concluding and at the same time opening debate on the themes migration, citizenship and planning between states, cities and markets.

This seminar "Concepts and critique of the production of space” is part of the module 11 "Urban culture, public space" (consisting of three courses, VO 280.534, SE 280.535 and UE 280.536) which is offered during three five days intensive teaching blocks (ITB) by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space (http://skuor.tuwien.ac.at). Module 11 compiles a set of integrated courses dealing with lived space at the interface of the fields of urban studies and urban design/urban planning. In 2019, the main focus will be on "Urban Citizenship: Public Space, Post-Migrational and Civic Innovation".

The courses mainly address master students (late bachelor or early doctoral students), especially from planning and architecture are invited to take part. Yet we explicitly welcome students coming from other Viennese universities in related disciplines, such as urban studies, urban design, geography, sociology, political science, landscape architecture, cultural studies, ... as well as 'Mitbeleger'.  The course language is English. We support students active participation in debates and interactive teaching formats, and encourage you to bring in and develop your own ideas and critical perspectives. We seek to create an international level of debate and exchange and welcome students from all countries and cultures. Just contact us (info@skuor.tuwien.ac.at).

Students interested in this course are highly recommended to take part in the seminar (TISS No 280.534) and the exercise (TISS No 280.536).To take part in all three courses of the module 11 please register for module 11 until 30^th September 2018 (23:59 pm) via TISS registration for the course, VO 280.534. Further course registration will be carried out directly at the kick-off meeting on 1^st of October, 9am in seminar Room 3/4, 2^nd floor, Augasse 2-6, 2^nd floor.

Dates of the Module 11

The main body of teaching will be delivered during three intensive teaching blocks (ITB):

ITB 1 – 1-5 October 2018

ITB 2 – 3-7 December 2018

ITB 3 – 21-25 January 2019

Students’ final grades will be composed of the following:

• Oral presentation of texts, including prepared questions for discussion and moderation of seminar unit (40%)

• Position paper (Thesenpapier) that summarizes the lines of argument, theses and conclusions of the presented texts in a brief but structured way, and that presents a well-reasoned own position towards the unit's theme (open format: text, poster, map, video clip, blog, poem, etc.) (30%)

• Attendance (80%, except ITB1) and active engagement in overall discussions, including constructive feedback to one chosen group (30%)

Registration via TISS course no 280.534

Participation in the module's lecture course is required in order to attend the seminar.