Special Issue: The Citizens in City-regions

Special Issue: The Citizens in City-regions

Guest editors: Anders Lidström and Linze Schaap

For the first time ever, a special collection of papers on the citizens in city-regions has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs.

It has become increasingly relevant to develop knowledge about citizenship in a city-regional setting as more people all over the world now live in city-regions. Commuting on a daily basis is common in city-regions as places for housing, work, and leisure are usually separated. This tends to weaken the connection to the municipality of residence, and creates patterns of territorial identification and political activism that extend beyond the municipality. This broadens the role of being a citizen and challenges existing—usually fragmented—patterns of governance and democracy in the city-region. The articles in this special issue investigate how patterns of city-regional citizenship vary between individuals and contexts.

Table of Contents (articles are available for free access, for a limited time!)

1. The Citizens in the City-Regions: Patterns and Variations, by Anders Lidström and Linze Schaap.

2. Being metropolitan: the effects of individual and contextual factors on shaping metropolitan identity, by Joan-Josep Vallbé, Jaume Magre, Mariona Tomàs

3. Territorial political orientations in Swedish city-regions, by Anders Lidström

4. How Metropolitan can you go? Citizenship in Polish city-regions, by Marta Lackowska and Łukasz Mikuła

5. Citizenship in the fragmented metropolis: an individual-level analysis from Switzerland, by Daniel Kübler

6. Sharing fairly? Mobility, citizenship and gender relations in two Swedish city-regions, by Christine Hudson

7. Regional or Parochial? Support for Cross-Community Sharing within City-Regions, by Michael Leo Owens and Jane Lawrence Sumner

8. Citizens’ Views on Governance in Two Swedish City-Regions, by Niklas Eklund

9. What About Metropolitan Citizenship? Attitudinal Attachment of Residents to Their City-Region, by Melanie Walter-Rogg

Anders Lidström is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Umeå University.

Linze Schaap is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration, and at the Tilburg Center for Regional Law and Governance (TiREG), at Tilburg University.