Solidarity Cities and Cosmopolitanism from Below: Barcelona as a Refugee City

Óscar García Agustín and Martin Bak Jørgensen
Additional contact information
Óscar García Agustín: Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark
Martin Bak Jørgensen: Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark

Social Inclusion, 2019, vol. 7, issue 2, 198-207

Abstract: The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ provoked a wave of solidarity movements across Europe. These movements contrasted with attitudes of rejection against refugees from almost all EU member states and a lack of coordinated and satisfactory response from the EU as an institution. The growth of the solidarity movement entails backlash of nationalized identities, while the resistance of the member states to accept refugees represents the failure of the cosmopolitan view attached to the EU. In the article, we argue that the European solidarity movement shapes a new kind of cosmopolitanism: cosmopolitanism from below, which fosters an inclusionary universalism, which is both critical and conflictual. The urban scale thus becomes the place to locally articulate inclusive communities where solidarity bonds and coexistence prevail before national borders and cosmopolitan imaginaries about welcoming, human rights, and the universal political community are enhanced. We use the case of Barcelona to provide a concrete example of intersections between civil society and a municipal government. We relate this discussion to ongoing debates about ‘sanctuary cities’ and solidarity cities and discuss how urban solidarities can have a transformative role at the city level. Furthermore, we discuss how practices on the scale of the city are up-scaled and used to forge trans-local solidarities and city networks.

Keywords: Barcelona; cosmopolitanism; municipalism; refugee crisis; solidarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/socialinclusion/article/view/2063 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:socinc:v7:y:2019:i:2:p:198-207

DOI: 10.17645/si.v7i2.2063

Access Statistics for this article

Social Inclusion is currently edited by Mariana Pires

More articles in Social Inclusion from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().