Citizens of a City

As a concept, citizenship is largely understood with reference to a person’s country such as ‘a citizen of India’. However, that is only one of the dimensions of what defines citizenship - as a legal status where a person comes under the law of a country as well as acts according to it. In India, the Citizenship Act, 1955 defines who is a citizen of India. This dimension equates citizenship with nationality.

The two other dimensions of citizenship as per some of the existing literature are citizens as political agents i.e. actors participating in political institutions of their society and citizenship as an identity, where citizens identify as members of a political community.

While there is this national connotation to the idea of a citizen, the identity of any person finally gets linked to the city or the place they come from. When we meet someone for the first time, we usually ask them a question, “Where are you from?” If the person is not from the same country, they will give us the name of their origin country. However, eventually to know where they belong, we go down maybe their state and eventually settle on a city that they live in or a city close to their town or village that we recognise.

The word root of city comes from the latin root ‘civis’ which means ‘citizen,’ bringing our focus to the fact that at the heart of the city are those who inhabit them. So while a person's identity is linked to the city they are from, the word city itself gets its meaning from the citizens (that live in a city). Walt Whitman also once said, “A great city is that which has the greatest men and women.”

Intuitively, we know a city when we see one - dense inhabitations with a majority of the population engaged in non-agricultural activities. There is no universal definition of a city; each country has its own definition. However, there are some parameters which are found in definitions of most countries, such as population, density, economic activities among others. In the next article, we look at some of these definitions and parameters for defining a city. 

Thus, while the first dimension of citizenship creates a link between citizens and their country, the other two dimensions can define citizens in relation to their communities along with the country. Hence, a citizen can take part in political institutions of their nation but also in their states and cities. Similarly, they can identify as a member of the community of people living in their city, state or country.

This piece is part of the Governance Series of the Nagrikal. Nagrikal is a platform for citizens from small cities to share their experiences so that they be channeled into policies.