Citizens Hall

Based on years of practical experience in small towns, Carrel argues for municipal autonomy—for turning what are now ‘colonies’ of the federal and provincial orders of government into independent, mature, and fully democratic entities. For Carrel, the citizen is the sole legitimate source of political power, and the best tool for citizen empowerment is the controversial tool of the referendum. This is the story of how a small municipality broke the rules of local government. It also recounts the author’s irreverence for the status quo and his ideas on the rebuilding of citizenship at the community level.

Involving citizens in policy decision-making has been a central goal of the Labour government since it came to power. But what happens when the public are drawn into debate with unfamiliar others in the unknown world of policy making at national level? This book sets out to understand the contribution that citizens can realistically make.

How can we learn from a multicultural society if we don’t know how to recognise it? The contemporary city is more than ever a space for the intense convergence of diverse individuals who shift in and out of its urban terrains. The city street is perhaps the most prosaic of the city’s public parts, allowing us a view of the very ordinary practices of life and livelihoods. By attending to the expressions of conviviality and contestation, ‘City, Street and Citizen’ offers an alternative notion of ‘multiculturalism’ away from the ideological frame of nation, and away from the moral imperative of community. This book offers to the reader an account of the lived realities of allegiance, participation and belonging from the base of a multi-ethnic street in south London. ‘City, Street and Citizen’ focuses on the question of whether local life is significant for how individuals develop skills to live with urban change and cultural and ethnic diversity. To animate this question, Hall has turned to a city street and its dimensions of regularity and propinquity to explore interactions in the small shop spaces along the Walworth Road. The city street constitutes exchange, and as such it provides us with a useful space to consider the broader social and political significance of contact in the day-to-day life of multicultural cities. Grounded in an ethnographic approach, this book will be of interest to academics and students in the fields of sociology, global urbanisation, migration and ethnicity as well as being relevant to politicians, policy makers, urban designers and architects involved in cultural diversity, public space and street based economies.

Eric Shragge taught community organizing and development at Concordia and now works with Mostafa Henaway as an organizer at the Immigrant Workers Centre. Jason Prince is an urban planner and social economy expert who teaches at Concordia University in Montreal,