Reframing sanctuary cities: embedded histories and the politics of urban citizenship

Sanctuary cities have long been held as sites where the limits of urban citizenship can be negotiated and remade. This article intervenes in urban citizenship studies by advancing an infrastructural fields perspective that centres on the long, radical histories of organizing that continue to shape sanctuary cities today. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in San Francisco, Toronto, and Sheffield, I argue that sanctuary cities cannot be understood without grappling with the long-term histories of the diverse movements that built them. Overlooking these genealogies obscures the labour of building intersectional solidarities, sidelines the costs of radical practices, and mischaracterizes the uneven, non-linear terrain of movement-building. This matters for scholarship because academics help shape the collective memory that can sustain infrastructures of dissent. Across the three cities, organizing rooted in civil rights, trade unionism, and Indigenous justice was crucial to sanctuary city declarations. Sanctuary cities are produced through long-standing, often conflicting interactions among faith groups, bureaucrats, and activists shaping urban citizenship in ways that are always contested, and, importantly, historically saturated.