# 3
Constructing cities of refuge
We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for cities of refuge. Is this possible? […] How can the right to asylum be redefined and developed without repatriation and without naturalisation? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law? […]
If the name and the identity of something like the city still has a meaning, could it, when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in anew and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)? Under the exemption itself (en général), the statutes of immunity or exemption occasionally had attached to them, as in the case of the right to asylum, certain places (diplomatic or religious) to which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of injustice.
Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism, 2021Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
Where does Europe begin and Where does Europe end
What if everything is entangled
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A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … C …
What if everything is entangled
Our political institutions have largely been built around borders and boundaries: states, territories, citizens and non-citizens — an Us and a Them. The proposal to reclaim the city as a political actor can therefore be read as a search for openings, breaches and passages within this landscape of bounded political bodies. The city becomes a possible site where the supposedly separate can meet, overlap and become entangled.
Perhaps this is more than a question of granting cities new rights or sovereignty. It is a question of recognising that political life has always exceeded the boundaries through which we try to contain it. Cities are already nodes of migration, encounter, dependence, exchange and solidarity. They reveal the relational fabric that the sovereign state tends to obscure.
Could the ville franche, then, become not simply a city liberated from the state, but a political form grounded in-between — a place where belonging is not defined exclusively by nationality, where hospitality and refuge emerge from relations of mutual interdependence? The search for new political actors may thus also be a search for a different political imagination: one that moves from separation towards entanglement, from sovereignty towards relationality, and from Us and Them towards Us and Them — and.
Meike Gleim
