In many places, citizens are developing new strategies to overcome these new challenges. In the context of reduced control by the state, they are taking the initiative. Through social, cultural, and economic work, people are building new ‘communities of interest’ that go beyond the boundaries of their nominal identity. They are forging strategic alliances with ‘others’, not to undermine their community, but to strengthen it. It is possible to be part of a community, and be a citizen of the wider city.

Citizens are not just the passive inhabitants of the city. They are also actors in the whole range of institutions in a city. They are not only the consumers, but the clients, the entrepreneurs, the developers, the providers, the carers, the planners, the builders, the architects. Their initiatives in cities include securing public spaces for universal use, opening up information technologies for wider access, providing different types of buildings responsive to different needs, planning new areas of the city as inclusive and integrated districts. What they have in common is a type of ‘civil enterprise’ which generates more power collectively than each could individually.

Planners are catching up with the idea that planning can be ‘bottom-up’ as well as ‘top-down’. People can invent their own practices of ‘insurgent citizenship’, coming together in new ways, for new reasons, and with new results. Cities can move ‘towards cosmopolis’ – a Utopia perhaps, but one that can never be realised, and must continually be “in the making”. A city can transcend the urban patchwork of differences