Local border practices and urban citizenship in Europe

Since the first signing of the Schengen Agreement in 1985, Europe's borders have been changing profoundly. New actors, rules and institutions have emerged and transformed the character of the European border regime. This paper argues that cities play a crucial role in this process. They have become an important arena, where the re-categorization and re-scaling of spaces and borders, and the expansion and diversification of the modes of control and enforcement within Europe take place. These dynamics are contradictory, however, as examples from Germany and Italy show: on the one hand, local state agencies, as well as private and semi-private institutions on the local scale increasingly participate in the monitoring and in the enforcement of migrants' legal statuses. On the other hand, local actors and institutions are also carving out place-specific spaces of rights and recognition for migrants. This dual process turns the urban realm into a conflictive site of negotiating, shaping and interconnecting local practices of border control and urban citizenship, and in effect renders European cities an uneven landscape of urban borderspaces.