Citizenship, spatial (in)justice, and the social psychology of place dispossession

The psychosocial dynamics that articulate citizenship practices, identities and entitlements cannot be fully understood outside their spatial preconditions and implications. Citizenship is often a “locational” practice involving banal assumptions and “hot” debates about proper behaviour in public space and who can claim legitimate belonging to a place-bound community of rights, by which the territorial and symbolic boundaries of citizenship are traced, contested and redrawn. This chapter explores how urban processes of place dispossession affect the lived and material experience of citizenship. First, we discuss existing social-psychological approaches that address citizenship as a place-based process in public space. Second, we introduce the concept of place dispossession, linking capitalist city-making, micropolitics of place and the right to the city. Third, we use the case of Barcelona (Spain) to present analytical vignettes illustrating psychosocial processes of place dispossession and its consequences on citizenship: control and denial of space; gentrified displacements and microsegregation; and inclusion through co-optation. These examples show how contemporary trends of place dispossession require deeper “locational” analyses of citizenship in social psychology, connecting place, justice and the pursuit of a better life under increasingly precarious conditions.