From citizens of nations to citizens of cities

by Yavor Tarinski

[C]itizens today no longer even approximate the high and eminently human standard of citizenship that was established in the Hellenic world—a meaning that must be recovered, as well as the personal and social training, or paideia, for producing citizens.
~Murray Bookchin[1]

Often, when people advocate for the reinvigoration of citizenship in response to ongoing crises, they are faced with an argument that views this concept as too exclusionary to be able to offer any meaningful path forward today. The citizen, the argumentation goes, is an individual part of a homogenous whole, which tends to reject anyone else from the outside.