Urban citizenship under pressure: rethinking infrastructures of sanctuary and solidarity in turbulent times

The urban citizenship of precaritised migrants is entering a critical conjuncture in which nation-states increasingly seek to turn cities into instruments of migration control, placing infrastructures of sanctuary and solidarity under mounting pressure. Drawing on the infrastructural turn in urban and migration studies, this introductory article develops an infrastructural perspective on urban citizenship, foregrounding everyday spaces of care, support, and solidarity as key sites where belonging, exclusion, and deportability are negotiated. We conceptualize the infrastructural politics of urban citizenship as the contentious processes through which infrastructures mediating the differential inclusion and (im)mobility of precaritised migrants are made, maintained, transformed, and dismantled through competing logics of control and solidarity. These infrastructural politics unfold across symbolic, relational, and spatial dimensions. Bringing together case studies from North America and Europe, the special issue shows how urban citizenship is advanced and undermined through these competing logics as well as through shifting relations among municipal actors, NGOs, faith-based organizations, migrant self-organizations, and autonomous groups. In turbulent times marked by authoritarian restructuring and the erosion of sanctuary arrangements, an infrastructural perspective reveals how urban infrastructures simultaneously mediate state power, enable solidarity, and shape the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.