Resistance in the City: Urban Contention, Citizenship, and Everyday Politics

Research on urban marginality, citizenship, and collective action long operated within conventions that obscured key dynamics of urban resistance. A geographic concentration on the global North treated cities in Europe and North America as the primary sites of theory-building. Liberal accounts of citizenship foregrounded individual rights and formal membership, sidelining the collective practices through which excluded populations construct belonging from below. Over the past years, scholarship has moved beyond these constraints. Comparative work now sets cases from the global South alongside those from the global North within shared analytical frames. The concept of citizenship has been extended to account for the ways marginalized urban dwellers assert rights through mobilization, occupation, and everyday practice rather than through formal channels alone. Research on mobilizational citizenship has shown how underprivileged urban communities sustain collective action over time by drawing on memory, identity, and decentralized forms of leadership. This field of study has also addressed demands over land tenure and housing. Gentrification research has become planetary in scope and increasingly attentive to the movements that resist displacement. Scholars have also shown that resistance operates along a continuum, from quiet encroachment and narrative contestation to sustained collective action, refusing any sharp boundary between the two.Four areas of contribution emerge from this recent scholarship and orient the scope of this Research Topic. First, territorial stigma and everyday resistance to stigmatisation, including how residents of defamed neighbourhoods contest symbolic degradation through narrative and community mobilisation. Second, citizenship in its different forms and the right to the city, with attention to how marginalised communities build durable political agency from below. Third, anti-displacement and anti-gentrification mobilisation as urban resistance, examining how housing and other movements confront the financialization of shelter and racial capitalism. Fourth, everyday politics, non-movements, and quiet encroachment under constrained conditions, tracing how ordinary people advance claims without formal organisation.This Research Topic invites empirical, theoretical, and methodologically diverse contributions addressing themes related to citizenship and resistance in urban contexts. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:• Territorial stigmatisation and narrative or discursive resistance• Citizenship and rights claims from urban settlements• Mobilizational citizenship, memory, and identity in marginalised communities• Anti-displacement and anti-gentrification organising• Everyday politics, emotions, non-movements, and quiet encroachment• Housing financialization and grassroots responses• Land tenure and housing movements• Racial capitalism and urban contention• Youth mobilisation and contested urban spaces• Gender, age, and intersectional dimensions of urban resistance• Patronage, clientelism, and the demobilisation of marginalised communities• Feminism and transformative urban politics• Environmental collective action, community adaptation, and sustainable urban transitionsComparative and transnational perspectives on urban movements across the global North and South Submissions from urban geography, sociology, political science, urban planning, anthropology, and urban social work are welcome. Comparative studies and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged. Topic editors: Simon Escoffier, Alejandra Rasse Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/87072/resistance-in-the-city-urban-contention-citizenship-and-everyday-politics