Limited urban citizenship: the case of community councils in East Jerusalem

Urban environments are often disputed over issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and race. Urban citizenship within such spaces has been found to be fragmented, or even ‘dark.’ This paper focuses on the role of an intermediary institution, the Community Council (CC), in the contested city of (East) Jerusalem. Building on in-depth interviews and site visits, we suggest that CCs implement a limited form of urban citizenship via a range of functions that vary from service provision to political representation. We explain the process by which this form of urban citizenship is created and operated, and highlight the precarity of limited urban citizenship in a non-democratic context where most people are stateless residents. Through this case, we seek to enrich the literature on urban citizenship and CCs in contested cities with an emphasis on the multiple urban and national logics that operate in space.