Migrants’ City-Zenship: To Surpass the Borders of the European Union Citizenship?

"…immigration provides perhaps the best introduction to the sociology of the state, because it constitutes the limit of what constitutes the national state. Immigration is the limit that reveals what it is intrinsically, or its basic truth." Abdelmalek Sayad And as such is the European Union project in its confrontation with migration, and consequently what it has called migrant or refugee crisis. The so-called refugee crisis is the basic truth of European Union project, to tell it with Sayad words. In the context of the contradictions of the European model, there has been experimentations, both from activism and institutional perspectives, to provide social city-zenship at urban level in order to recognize the presence of the people who are living in a certain territory, although not having been recognized by the national-states. The paper aims to study some experimental models of city-zenship cards for refugees, addressing the questions on “how these models address the European Union model of citizenship? How do they locate themselves in the so-called refugee crisis? How do they manage the process of providing the social city-zenship? Which technologies do they use and how do they relate with the digitalization of identities? How do they act inside the institutional limits and in which ways they try to surpass those limits?