Chapter 6 describes how some local governments have given rights of citizenship, including voting rights, to nonresident landowners; in some cases, municipalities have actually limited the franchise exclusively to landowners. Once again, this is indicative of the distinctive nature of local citizenship. Property ownership ceased being a prerequisite for voting in state and federal elections by the 1850s, as citizenship was coming to be seen primarily in ethno-nationalist terms as a matter of shared identity. Local governments, reflecting their history as commercial entities, have been more open to tying the franchise to landownership, and as a de facto matter, many cities today use zoning regulations to ensure that anyone who cannot afford to purchase a home cannot acquire residence, and therefore the right to vote. This de facto property qualification for local citizenship illustrates that local citizenship is constructed as purely private and liberal, predicated upon consumer choice, mobility, and self-interest rather than identity or civic activity.

By the late nineteenth century the prevailing ethno-nationalist ethos of the day established that noncitizens were incapable of federal citizenship because of both racial distinctions and questions about their loyalty. At the same time, however, local citizenship was coming to be understood as something entirely different, determined by mobility and choice rather than loyalty and identity. Some cities have accordingly granted the right of suffrage to noncitizen residents on the grounds that they share a common interest with other local residents in the provision of municipal services. Perhaps more importantly, cities are required to give noncitizens many “social rights” that have increasingly come to be synonymous with citizenship, such as education and security. Noncitizens have been granted these social rights on the premise that such rights should be distributed based on residence rather than nationality. In order to make local citizenship a matter of private consumer choice, local services are bundled together with residence so that local “consumer-voters” can more efficiently shop for municipalities in which to settle.

This introduction provides an overview of the argument of the book. Although citizenship is often believed to reside exclusively at the national scale, the introduction describes how there is a distinctively local idea of citizenship that exists alongside federal citizenship. Where federal citizenship is distributed based on nationality, local citizenship has generally been made available to all residents regardless of nationality. Although local and federal citizenship have long been complementary, globalization is now causing them to come into conflict. That Donald Trump was elected on a stridently nationalistic, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban political platform at the same time that cities like San Francisco extended local voting rights to noncitizen residents who are ineligible to vote in state and federal elections illustrates how divergent ideas about local and federal citizenship are the sources of a major political crisis.

Chapter 4 presents the historical case of women’s suffrage. Though prior to the Nineteenth Amendment women were deemed unsuited for citizenship at the national level because their designated role was exclusively within the private sphere of the home rather than the public sphere of politics, they nevertheless attained the right to vote in local elections in many places because the municipality was itself perceived as a private, home-like sphere dedicated to quotidian functions like the care of children that fell squarely within women’s sphere. Granting women the right to vote in local elections was thus consistent with the idea that local citizenship was qualitatively distinct from national citizenship.

Chapter 3 presents a brief history of local citizenship that describes the process by which our ideas about citizenship came to be divided between federal and local scales. Our bifurcated conception of citizenship was a highly contingent product of the nation-state’s long evolution from the ancient city-state. There was never a conscious decision to divide citizenship the way we did.

Finally, chapter 11 considers “differentiated” citizenship. This model would incorporate people into the political life of the city as members of their cultural subgroups rather than as individuals. Differentiated citizenship thus enables historically marginalized groups to assert collective rights that have often been denied them under the individualistic liberal model. These groups would have the ability to exercise control over places with which they share deep cultural, economic and political ties. Differentiated citizenship thus attempts to steer between republican and postmodern citizenship. It calls for recognition of normative subgroups in society, but in a manner that will incorporate those subgroups into political life, rather than enabling them to withdraw from political life. Differentiated citizenship rejects both the republican insistence upon a homogenous political community that rigidly polices its borders as well as the postmodern refusal to draw boundary lines at all. Ultimately, differentiated citizenship is problematic because it reinforces the marginalization of the groups it wishes to empower by legitimizing the status quo of racially identified places.

Chapter 7 brings the three case studies of women, noncitizens, and landowners together to show how, as globalization has caused the public/private distinction to come apart, the distinctively local form of citizenship has seeped into the sphere of national citizenship and threatened the meaning of citizenship. With increasing labor and capital mobility across national borders, nation-states confront the same pressures cities have long faced to confer citizenship on the basis of interest and choice rather than nationality, but there is fierce opposition to doing so on the grounds that it will undermine the basis of national citizenship by fraying the ties of ethnicity, history, and territory that supposedly link the members of the state’s “imagined community.” This opposition takes the form of growing animosity toward free trade, immigration, and the cities that symbolize an open and flexible approach to citizenship.

Chapter 9 revisits the republican conception of the citizen, a conception that has been largely muted in modern society in favor of the liberal and ethno-nationalist ideas. In recent years there has been an effort to “revive” republicanism as an alternative to both the consumerism and individualism of liberal citizenship and the unreflective jingoism of ethnic nationalism. Scholars like Michael Sandel have drawn upon the republican tradition of city-state citizenship to call for a renewed commitment to a republican urban citizenship. In this vision, the city would have the means to buffet itself against the forces of global capitalism and the disruptions of gentrification, and its public places – its parks, schools and libraries – would be sites of civic activity where strangers could mingle without being judged either by their identity or their wallet. Unfortunately, however, the republican concern with protecting the city from the world leads it down the path to a quasi-nationalist xenophobia, in which outsiders are ostracized and scapegoated.

In a conclusion, I argue that the reason these theories all fail is because attempting to excise liberalism from local citizenship is futile. Cities were built on commerce, and commerce is as much in the lifeblood of cities as politics is. But liberalism has never been only about commerce. It is also about equality. Because of its commitment to equality, liberalism has had a far better track record in advancing human freedom than any of its competitors. And as globalization has advanced, we may have gone too far down the path of liberalism to turn back. Embracing liberalism, while also committing to reforming it, will enable us to harness the best of local citizenship’s historical legacy for a future in which the fate of citizenship and the nation-state are still uncertain.

Chapter 1 explains how the modern state simultaneously maintains commitments to three different conceptions of citizenship that are all in some tension with each other: the republican, liberal, and ethno-nationalist models of citizenship. Liberalism stresses individual market freedom and natural rights; republicanism emphasizes collective civic activity; ethno-nationalism is based on solidarity and identity. We have managed to mute the inherent conflicts among these conceptions through the distinction, long central to the idea of citizenship, between the “public” and “private” spheres. Citizens live primarily private lives, where they are ruled by the marketplace and individual desires, but occasionally enter the public sphere to engage in politics, where they become part of an organic polity unified by a common sense of purpose and shared civic identity.

Chapter 8 explores several traditions of citizenship that all reject the liberal idea of citizenship founded in consumption and markets as well as the ethno-nationalist idea of citizenship based upon a “public” perceived as an organic unity. The public is apprehended instead as a place where strangers come together, and citizenship as an activity that occurs in those public places. In other words, the public is a city, and the citizen is a participant in a vibrant and diverse civic life rather than either a passive consumer or subsumed within a solidaristic entity. Unlike the liberal idea of local citizenship that privileges mobility solely for the white middle class, these alternative traditions seek to empower communities of color to chart their own destinies by asserting their rights to the city’s places.

Chapter 10 introduces the “postmodern” conception of local citizenship. On this view, the city is a “fortuitous association” where people come together in all of their differences, and where members of marginalized groups exercise a form of citizenship by appearing in public and challenging their formal exclusion from political power. Unlike the republican idea, postmodern citizenship rejects walls and rejects the idea that the city should isolate itself from the world; it is open and borderless. Yet, for that very reason, postmodern citizenship is necessarily fragile and ephemeral. A borderless city risks diluting the normative subgroups that make it possible to tolerate the impersonality and anonymity of the city; if they lose their ability to withdraw into their subgroups, people may flee the city entirely for ethnically and racially homogenous suburbs.