Contexts of interaction for plural city politics: hybrid forums and cosmopolitics

If we take city politics as the focus of our attention, one of the features which emerges from an analysis of the contemporary city is the large number of people excluded from the rights of citizenship. By “rights of citizenship” we mean something more complex than access to basic services or the right to vote. Our focus is the exclusion from participating in the process of defining the common good and formulating the rules of urban cohabitation. Our hypothesis is that this exclusion often has its roots at the level of the representation of the city itself; in other words, in the definition of the “coexisting subjects” who are the protagonists in the city-building process.