Sanctuary cities and urban struggles

Book excerpt: Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how cities are challenging the primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. It brings together cutting-edge scholars of political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies and refugee studies to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration. By offering a collection of empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond 'seeing like a state', Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles proposes not a singular alternative but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political imagination and practice. In an era when migrant rights are under attack and nationalism is on the rise, the topic of how citizenship, rights and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.