Exploring the role of regulation in urban citizenship practices: looking at Swiss and Turkish cities

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Exploring the role of regulation in urban citizenship
practices: looking at Swiss and Turkish cities
Elif Durmuş
To cite this article: Elif Durmuş (2024) Exploring the role of regulation in urban citizenship
practices: looking at Swiss and Turkish cities, The International Journal of Human Rights, 28:7,
1159-1188, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2024.2335538
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Exploring the role of regulation in urban citizenship practices:
looking at Swiss and Turkish cities
Elif Durmuş
University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium
ABSTRACT
‘Urban citizenship’connotes to statuses and practices centred
around the relationship between a locality and (all) individuals
present or residing within its territory. This alternative
imagination of citizenship (as opposed to formal nation-state
citizenship) is based on a presumption of belonging for persons
present/resident in the locality (ius domicii) and includes those
typically excluded by the nation-state, in a radical vision of
equality and non-discrimination. But domestic legal
competences of local governments vary significantly across
jurisdictions. This article, based on field research in Turkey and
Switzerland, explores what role such domestic competences, or
the regulation of local governments, plays in facilitating,
encouraging, discouraging or obstructing local governments’
engagement with radically inclusive urban citizenship practices.
First operationalising the concept of ‘regulation’and establishing
Turkey and Switzerland as low- and high-regulation country
contexts respectively, this article identifies four ways in which
regulation shapes urban citizenship practices of local
governments: (a) by shaping local governments’perception on
their own autonomy; (b) by influencing whether local
governments engage in legally foreseen or extra-legal practices;
(c) by informing whether and how much local governments
categorise different groups of rights-holders and; (d) by affecting
which scales these urban citizenship practices are exercised in
(upwards, downwards, horizontal).
KEYWORDS
local governments;
regulation; urban citizenship;
undocumented migrants;
cities; migration
1. Introduction
As most national governments opt for increasingly securitised, externalised and exclu-
sionary migration policies, the eyes of progressive academics and civil society have
been turning towards the local level as a venue for alternative paradigms in the govern-
ance of migration and integration. One result of such a move has been the increased
attention on the concept and practices of ‘urban citizenship’. The definition of urban citi-
zenship is still contested –but can provisionally be described as the bond between the
locality (and/or its local government) with the people present or residing in its territory
(ius domicii),
1
as well as an imagination of a polity at the local level, its members bound to
each other and to the city through a kind of citizenship that is ‘emancipated’
2
from
© 2024 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Elif Durmuşelif.durmus@uantwerpen.be @_Elif_Durmus, @UUCoR
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2024.2335538.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS
2024, VOL. 28, NO. 7, 1159–1188
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642987.2024.2335538

nationality and grounded in spatiality.
3
This focus on the local level and on urban citizen-
ship has brought about multiple shifts in perspective when thinking about migration,
rights and citizenship: For instance, in the urban citizenship paradigm, everyone residing
(or present), in the territory of the locality can be presumed to belong without the explicit
consent of the pre-existing polity of local citizens; instead of granting belonging as a birth
right (ius sanguinis or ius soli) to some and continuing from a presumption of exclusion
for everyone else.
4
Urban citizenship seeks to radically include, perhaps most signifi-
cantly, those traditionally ‘unwanted’: refugees, (rejected) asylum seekers, undocumented
migrants, the homeless, the poor, etc. The presumption of belonging and therefore the
presumption of right-holdership that urban citizenship can bring about is also in line
with the philosophy underlying human rights, especially with the principles of univers-
ality and inalienability, as it refuses categorisations common to the paradigm of formal,
nation-state citizenship (e.g. national, highly-skilled migrant, refugee, undocumented
migrant, etc.). In a more legal sense, urban citizenship can be interpreted as a radical
realisation of the principles of equality and non-discrimination, which are enshrined
in every major human rights instrument including the European Convention on
Human Rights (ECHR). This radical reinterpretation stems from the alternative para-
digm of localism that negates state-centiricism: a paradigm of equality, inclusion and
full enjoyment of human rights for everyone within a given territory rather than primar-
ily only citizens and ‘desirable foreigners’. This is why many see urban citizenship as a
pathway through which to achieve a higher realisation of human rights.
5
Since Varsanyi shone the spotlight on the potential of urban citizenship in offering
protection to one of the most excluded groups: undocumented migrants,
6
urban citizen-
ship scholarship has expanded significantly. In addition to a focus on voting rights for
foreigners in local elections
7
and the ‘Right to the City’of the economically, socially
and spatially marginalised;
8
scholarship now includes a consideration for the practices
by local governments pushing their constitutional boundaries to create an inclusive
environment for the ‘unwanted’of the state: refugees and (undocumented) migrants.
9
Many have argued that local governments have serious potential to improve the living
conditions of undocumented migrants, whose lives are otherwise governed by precar-
ity,
10
a deliberate outcome of state-centric migration governance.
11
An exploration of
the discretionary spaces these practices are conducted in and the role of domestic legal
regulations bordering them have been identified as perhaps the most important next
step by scholars.
12
Aleinikofffor instance argued that a discussion on local governments’
practices in including traditionally excluded groups through urban citizenship is
‘useful (…) only to the extent that urban areas possess legal authority—some form of
sovereignty—to rule by and for themselves’.
13
This Article constitutes an attempt to
tackle the relevance of this so-called ‘sovereignty’, precisely by looking at how the level
of regulation in a domestic legal system shapes the discretionary spaces a local government
enjoys in practicing urban citizenship, and the set of strategies she adopts at the face of
different degrees of regulation.
The actual practices of urban citizenship by local governments have been sporadic,
controversial and challenging; whether politically, legally, economically or socially.
14
Lit-
erature examining urban citizenship practices is plagued with the overrepresentation of
‘best practice’cities which may enjoy the best circumstances.
15
Meanwhile, any exemp-
lary value of such studies for other local authorities within or across state boundaries
1160 E. DURMUŞ

remains questionable due to the widely diverging domestic legal settings leaving them
discretionary spaces of diverging shapes, sizes and flexibility.
16
This Article will thus
explore how local governments navigate urban citizenship in widely different legal set-
tings, operationalised by the concepts of high- and low-regulation.
To take on this exploration, this Article will first (Section 2) discuss the methodology
underlying this research and then (Section 3) introduce the concept of urban citizenship.
Next (Section 4), the author’s conceptualisation of ‘regulation’will be introduced, and
placed within a larger conceptual framework including such notions as ‘legal ambiguity’,
‘competence’and ‘discretionary spaces’. The operationalisation of the spectrum that
spans between ‘high-regulation’and ‘low-regulation’will also be explained and
justified here. Following this Section will be a brief background (Section 5) on the
national contexts of Turkey and Switzerland, with a particular focus on the laws and
regulations laying down the divisions of labour, competences, responsibilities and
resources for local governments in the field of migration and integration. Section 6
will then tentatively map four ways in which regulative frameworks might be influencing
how local governments in Switzerland and Turkey engage in urban citizenship practices;
namely, (a) affecting perceived discretionary space and competences, (b) affecting local
governments’choices in and between legal and extra-legal uses of discretion, (c)
causing local governments to group inhabitants in categories and assign them rights
accordingly and (d) affecting how local governments engage in upwards, downwards
and horizontal forms of engagement with urban citizenship. In conclusion, this Article
will demonstrate that regulation indeed matters in how local governments can and do
engage with urban citizenship practices, and that further robust investigation of this
relationship is necessary.
2. Methodology
The data underlying this research was collected and analysed from 13 case studies of
Turkish and Swiss municipalities: eight urban Turkish municipalities in the provinces
of Ankara and Istanbul, including one metropolitan municipality (Ankara Metropolitan
Municipality); and five Swiss municipalities, of which one medium-sized town (Illnau-
Effretikon), two cities within larger, mostly rural cantons (Zürich and Bern) and two
City-States (Basel and Geneva).
17
The local governments were selected to represent a
variety of different administrative statuses and levels of competence, as well as either
have a level of engagement with either human rights or progressive migration policies
in a way that had become known amongst practitioners in the national contexts. The
UN defines local governments as the ‘lowest tier of general public administration in a
State’.
18
Nonetheless, two City-States (Geneva and Basel) were included in this research
as they govern territories which constitute a single urbanity, despite their differential sta-
tuses and powers. The two country contexts of Turkey and Switzerland represent two
ends of the spectrum of regulation, allowing for a comparative study (Section 5).
The field research included, in total 47 interviews (20 in Turkey, 27 in Switzerland)
with local government, civil society and international organisation officials; and partici-
pant observation among local governments and civil society. In addition, desk research
was conducted into Turkish and –with the invaluable help of three student researchers:
Natalia Burduli, Lea Jörg and Margherita Götze –Swiss legal and administrative regimes
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1161

pertaining to the cross-section of migration and local governments.
19
References are
made throughout this Article to interviews, some of which are anonymised (names
and the municipalities) based on the wishes of the interviewees. Informed consent was
given for each of the interviews in advance, with multiple degrees of anonymisation
(or not) for interviewees to opt for regarding the use of direct quotes. The informed
consent included the use of interview data in the research as well as in publications.
As the research did not involve vulnerable individuals but only interviews that qualify
as ‘expert interviews’in scholarship, there were no external ethics requirements appli-
cable either from our university
20
or from the states in which the research was conducted.
Our project Cities of Refuge
21
nonetheless had an internal ethics protocol that we volun-
tarily submitted for feedback to the university’s ethics committee.
My epistemological and methodological approach to this research was social construc-
tivism and iterative theorisation based on grounded theory.
22
While I had a research
interest in the role decentralisation, the concept and central importance of regulation
arose only towards the end of my field research. This idea was developed iteratively
through further interviews, research trips and participant observation, until theoretical
categories were saturated. Through the cycle of further data collection, analysis and
writing, the three elements of operationalising regulation (Section 4), and the four
ways in which regulation influences urban citizenship practices (Section 6), emerged.
3. Urban citizenship, local governments and human rights
Urban citizenship scholarship has been diverse and flourishing in the last decades.
23
Var-
sanyi identifies three understandings of urban citizenship in literature: (a) cosmopolitan/
transnational citizenship, that has the city only as locus, (b) urban citizenship as rescaling
(‘multilevel’
24
or ‘multiscalar’citizenship’)
25
and (c) agency-centred approaches to citi-
zenship as identity contested through grassroots demands.
26
She then proposes a
fourth understanding of urban citizenship, one which focusses on what local govern-
ments are doing to challenge the lived realities of marginalisation and exclusion from
nation-state citizenship for people without a legal status, present and/or residing in
the city.
27
The 2020 blog symposium edited by Bauböck and Orgad demonstrate how
far the literature has come since then, and to what extent migration, and especially the
rights and inclusion of undocumented migrants have become one of the core topics of
focus.
28
Urban citizenship can be defined both as a legal/political status –often formalised and
accompanied by rights and obligations –as well as a practice and process of contestation
and identity-building.
29
Both definitions link the individual to a city (or locality, to be
more inclusive of suburban and rural localities) with a presumption of belonging
based on presence and/or residence (ius domicii).
30
This ground of belonging seems to
be widely accepted by the majority of scholars and (local) practitioners on urban citizen-
ship as a sine qua non requirement for the concept of urban citizenship to be meaning-
ful.
31
The concept of ‘residence’being a source of belonging and rights goes back to Henri
LeFevbre and his conceptualisation of the closely related Right to the City, (‘(…) right to
the city is earned by living in the city’
32
). Ius domicii would include people ‘who over-
stayed their visas or work permits, failed refugee claimants who nevertheless remain in
the city, and those who crossed the border without state permission’.
33
In the words of
1162 E. DURMUŞ

the Mayor of Palermo: ‘If you are in Palermo, you are a Palermitan. (…) [A]s long as you
are in Palermo, you are a Palermitan’.
34
This is often contrasted to the understanding of
citizenship at the nation-state level which is a formal legal status that grants rights and
obligations deriving from belonging, based on the ius sanguinis (having parents who
are nationals) or the ius soli (being born on the soil of the state) principles. Bauböck
explains that this openness is necessary as local governments, due to freedom of move-
ment rights within a nation-state, have open borders, and must offer services to people
who ‘select themselves into municipalities’.
35
Many scholars argue that in today’s globalised and pluralist world with an increasing
number of individuals being mobile, migrating and having multiple coexisting identities
and loyalties, the state-centric and ‘bounded’
36
(i.e. where the inclusion of an individual
depends on the explicit consent of the polity) citizenship of the nation-state creates too
many outcomes of exclusion, marginalisation as well as violations of human rights which
are meant to be enjoyed universally and without distinction.
37
Some scholars have gone
further to argue that the state does not enjoy any ‘natural’
38
or self-evident sovereignty to
restrict the freedom of movement, especially concerning those persons already present in
its territory, and often has to go out of its way to demonstrate or ‘perform’
39
sovereignty
in order to exclude.
40
It is however not only the differences in jurisdictional scales and pragmatic reasons
that distinguish urban citizenship from nation-state citizenship. In the words of one
of our interviewees, Franziska Teuscher, the Director of Education, Sports and Social
Affairs of the City of Bern, who refers to urban citizenship as a ‘vision’
41
‘process’
42
‘imagined society’
43
and ‘societal model’
44
:‘(…) [M]y understanding is that a
society consists of people who live together, work together, go to school together,
have their free time together and not of people who have the same nationality or
socio-economic background. My ideal is actually that everyone in Bern would be
equal’.
45
This reflects the scholarship in the field, which juxtaposes the ‘tangible
urban community (…)defined by the physical space of the city and the way this
space is used on a daily basis’
46
and the imagined nation, which is based on ‘cultural
artefacts’of the nation-state.
47
While all this sounds ambitious and beautiful, it is also abstract. What exactly would
be the content of urban citizenship? What rights, obligations, or alternatively, practices
and contestations fall within? I will be applying the concept of urban citizenship strictly
as practiced by local governments, and not as contested by the (potential) citizens. In this
regard, this definition of urban citizenship is similar to Varsanyi’s fourth type of urban
citizenship: local government practices for undocumented migrants.
48
The concept of
urban citizenship could apply to all disadvantaged and traditionally excluded groups
(the poor, homeless, sex workers, beggars, persons with disabilities, elderly, children,
women, street animals …). However, this Article will be focussing on urban citizenship
practices by local governments for non-nationals –practices such as: the generation of
status rights (e.g. right to vote in local elections),
49
symbols of identity and belonging
(e.g. city ID cards),
50
practices, policies and discourses created with a purpose to
include the excluded, without leaving anyone behind.
51
This application of urban citizenship is closely linked with many specific human rights
(including but not limited to the rights to political participation, housing, education,
work and health) as well as cross-cutting human rights principles (equality and non-
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1163

discrimination). In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), while
the principles of equality and non-discrimination are applied in tandem with specific
substantive rights, a formal ‘violation’of the latter is not necessary for the principles
to be found to be violated.
52
The Court has applied the equality and non-discrimination
clause in relation to many rights related to local governments such as employment,
53
social security,
54
education.
55,56
Importantly, while nationality is listed explicitly as a
ground for discrimination prohibited by the ECHR, immigration status has also been
acknowledged by the Court as a prohibited ground for discrimination under the ‘other
status’category in the wording of Article 14, with rich case law linking discrimination
based on nationality and ‘other status’with many (even political) rights, often associated
with privileges of being a citizen of the nation.
57
Nonetheless, in today’s state-centric, criminalised and exclusionary migration law and
governance, Arendt’s critique that human rights mean nothing if they do not apply to
non-nationals holds particularly strong.
58
While the law requires equality to be the
norm and differentiated enjoyment of rights to be the exception, today’s practice
reverts norm and exception. Urban citizenship, with its pushback against state-centrism
and its constitution of a political community only based on presence or residence in a
given place, can constitute a radical realisation of the principles of equality and non-dis-
crimination. Despite anecdotal evidence available, the success or effectiveness of urban
citizenship practices in reaching a fair, equal and inclusive society will be outside the
scope of this Article.
Finally, the term urban citizenship will be applied as meaning local citizenship, appli-
cable theoretically to rural and sub-urban contexts. The choice for the term ‘urban’is
grounded mostly in its wider prevalence in practice and scholarship. This leads us to
the role of regulation: an issue ‘any conception of urban citizenship worthy of consider-
ation must figure out’.
59
4. A conceptualisation of the regulation of local governments’
competences in migration
Bauböck identified the cross-cutting salience of the question: ‘What is the connection
between empowering cities and extending local citizenship to all residents?’
60
Aleinikoff
argued that urban citizenship only has meaning insofar as the urban (the local govern-
ment) has ‘legal authority –some kind of sovereignty’.
61
Orgad indicated at a distinct
direction that the empowerment of local governments could strive for:
a greater autonomy in constitutional interpretation of national laws. The overall idea is to
grant local bodies (…) the power to deviate from mandatory national norms according to
the composition of the local population, its social and cultural traditions, and its special
interests and needs.
62
This confirms Motomura’s argument that uncertainty in higher-level laws and directives
creates room for manoeuvre –or discretionary spaces –for local governments.
63
Litera-
ture on local government reforms also points towards the importance of ‘autonomy’.
64
According to this scholarship, many urban citizenship practices of local governments
would qualify as local government reform, as they possess characteristics such as (i) insti-
tutional changes in the local government (e.g. the establishment of social cohesion,
1164 E. DURMUŞ

integration, or human rights departments), (ii) institution-wide cross-sectional policies
(e.g. the mainstreaming of human rights, social cohesion or equality principles through-
out the local government), (iii) the ‘intensification of intermunicipal cooperation’and
(iv) changes towards more participatory and direct-democratic governance (e.g. trying
to give non-national residents the right to vote)
65
.
66
Keuffner states that ‘(…) the insti-
tutional framework facilitates or restricts the behaviour of actors, [but] it does not
entirely determine it’.
67
Many factors other than regulation influence local governments’
(proactive) behaviour,
68
but they will be outside the scope of this Article.
This interdisciplinary scholarly debate resorts to many different terms –‘authority’
69
,
‘sovereignty’
70
,‘power’
71
,‘autonomy’
72
,‘competence’
73
,‘discretion’
74
,‘legal ambiguity’
75
to mean similar, interrelated, yet not identical concepts. In this Article, I will only be
using the following concepts (and their interrelationships) illustrated in Figure 1 below:
I conceptualise Competence Area as the space in which the exercise of authority by the
local government is foreseen by higher level laws and directives. The actual Exercised
Competence is the space in which the local government makes policies, discursively
engages with issues, and where there is practice by ‘street level bureaucrats’.
76
Regulation,
as an umbrella term for higher level laws and directives, can both explicitly oblige and
permit local governments to take action in a certain subject-matter. Legal ambiguity con-
notes here to a context shaped by laws and directives that are either non-existent, unclear,
Figure 1. Interrelation between Regulation, Legal Ambiguity, Competence and Discretion. The four
boxes indicate different scenarios of local governments exercising authority within the space
framed (dark, solid borders) by regulation. Legal ambiguity is demonstrated by the lack of
solid borders, and the presence of permeable, light borders instead. Discretionary space is the
room for manoeuvre drawn explicitly by regulation, as well as (though perhaps more precariously)
that created by the presence of legal ambiguity.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1165

or insufficient to demonstrate the will of the legislator. Spaces left within the officially
drawn Competence Area of local governments, as well as those created by legal ambiguity,
are referred to as Discretionary Spaces.
Regulation and Competence Areas drawn by them, can of course be challenged. We
previously theorised discursively explicit and implicit strategies of divergence practiced
by local governments in migration governance as ‘deviation’(explicit –within the
law), ‘defiance’(explicit –extra-legal), ‘dilution’(implicit –within the law) and
‘dodging’(implicit –extra-legal).
77
The line distinguishing the ‘legal’from the ‘extra-
legal’is often fuzzy, vague, or non-existent, and largely contested in where it is socially
and politically construed to lie. This is an indication of Legal Ambiguity, which can on
the one hand ‘reinforce legal uncertainty regarding responsibilities and ‘divisions of
labour’among policy actors,
78
and on the other hand, create discretionary spaces that
are productive for the generation of innovative policies. Some of these contestations
by local governments can constitute local government reform.
79
In addition, the explicit
challenges local governments exert towards the limits of their competence can also lead
to responses, both horizontally, as other cities explicitly distance themselves from, or start
picking up the same practices and the exception slowly turns into a norm,
80
and verti-
cally, if ‘higher-level’authorities welcome the proactive engagement, or attempt to
stop the perceived transgression in explicit and legally formulated terms.
81
All these
responses to the initial challenge can lead to a change in the majority-opinion concerning
what then now the Competence Area actually covers. This way, an explicit challenge to
competences may reduce Legal Ambiguity and even Discretionary Spaces, but potentially
broaden the Competence Area.
Importantly, I refer to Regulation, for the purposes of this Article, not as ‘government
intervention in the private sphere’
82
nor as ‘achieving public goals using rules or stan-
dards of behaviour backed up by the sanctions or rewards of the state’
83
adefinition
extending to governments’governing of themselves. I also do not refer to ‘Regulation
Theory’: a Marxist theory on how capitalism governs and suppresses instabilities
brough about by wealth accumulation.
84
In contrast, I refer to ‘regulation’as domestic
laws and executive directives that govern not only the substance of local governments’
activities, but also and especially the jurisdictional/competential spaces they are
allowed to operate in. Regulation as I refer to it is thus more about the division of
labour between state organs and competing jurisdictional spaces, than about achieving
economic, financial or public policy outcomes.
As the complete set of norms applicable to the functioning of a local government are
very complex, Regulation will be operationalised by the following three elements for the
purposes of this Article:
i. The presence of national (and regional, if available) laws and directives on the con-
crete competences and obligations of local governments in the realm of migration
and integration, at times even concretised by benchmarks
ii. The presence of a clearly allocated and sufficient budget dedicated to the above-
described competences and obligations
iii. The presence of a clear and structured division of labour between different branches
and levels of government (local, regional, national) in the field of migration and
integration
1166 E. DURMUŞ

These three elements for the operationalisation of the concept of Regulation are dis-
tilled from my desk and field research in Turkey and Switzerland. According to this oper-
ationalisation, a ‘high regulation context’is one in which the presence and strong
representation of all three elements are found in grey literature and interviews. In con-
trast, a ‘low regulation context’is a context in which at least two of the three elements are
non-existent or legally ambiguous. Of course, the axis of regulation is a spectrum.
Between the years 2018–2021 in which the data for this research was collected, Switzer-
land can be classified as a high-regulation context, and Turkey as a low-regulation
context (see Section 5).
This Article does not argue that (wide) discretionary spaces are inherently good or
bad. High- and low-regulation contexts as defined in this Article can lead to both pro-
ductive and damaging outcomes for the (sustainable) inclusion of marginalised people
through urban citizenship practices. I will now briefly discuss the country contexts of
Turkey and Switzerland according to this conceptual framework.
5. The level of regulation on local governments and migration
governance in Turkey and Switzerland
5.1. Turkey
According to the conceptual framework laid out in the Section above, Turkey is a low-
regulation context. Syrian refugees, the largest group of migrants in Turkey, are under
a collective temporary protection regime pursuant to the Law on Foreigners and Inter-
national Protection.
85
Their individual asylum cases are handled by the UNHCR and
they can be resettled in third countries (though this is extremely rare). These persons
cannot acquire refugee status under Turkish law:
86
Turkey is a party to the 1951
Refugee Convention with a geographical reservation, recognising only persons coming
from Europe as ‘refugees’.
87
As the refugee status in international law is declaratory
and not constitutive,
88
I will continue to refer to people in Turkey coming from Syria
escaping the war, as Syrian refugees. This reservation means however that according
to Turkish law, persons under temporary protection are not meant to integrate; the
only durable solutions foreseen for them are third-country resettlement and voluntary
returns.
While Syrian refugees under temporary protection were initially hosted in refugee
camps at the border, in reality, these camps quickly proved insufficient in hosting the
growing numbers.
89
In the lack of a formal dispersal regime, Syrian refugees slowly dis-
persed themselves across Turkish cities, first closest to the refugee camps and the border,
and later, throughout all 81 provinces of Turkey. Refugees only need to register at the
governorate of the province they are in. The provincial and local governorates are
organs of the national government, not decentralised self-governing bodies. Local gov-
ernments themselves, which are locally elected and to some extent decentralised, have
no formal tasks in the reception and integration of refugees. The Law on Foreigners
and International Protection as well as the Directive on Temporary Protection enacted
in 2013 hold almost no reference to municipalities, except for a seeming afterthought
at the end of a long list of consultees in case the national government decides to
develop integration policies.
90
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1167

On the other hand, the Law on Municipalities lists a variety of services that need to be
provided by local governments in Turkey, which is still a relatively small Competence
Area compared to their European (and most certainly their Swiss) counterparts.
Turkish municipalities are mostly responsible for logistic and maintenance duties, on
roads, the water system, garbage collection, etc. They also have the obligation to build
and maintain schools, but education itself is regulated at the national level. The munici-
palities have no tasks in healthcare, vocational training, unemployment, language courses
or integration of foreigners in general. They are obliged to create ‘Town Councils’con-
sisting of stakeholders of the town if they are above a certain size, but there is no mention
of non-nationals.
The most significant legal ambiguity arises from a terminological problem in this
legislation. The Law on Municipalities states that everyone who lives in the territory of
the local government is a ‘hemşehri’or (co-)citizen who is ‘entitled to participate in
local government’s decisions and services, to be informed about local government activi-
ties and benefit from the material aid of the local government’.
91
However, the long list of
tasks of the local government are introduced by stating that the municipality needs to
provide these services to ‘nationals’.
92
What is largely believed to be a mistake in the
drafting process of the legislation is now a cause of legal ambiguity, as it is unclear
whether the non-national (co-)citizens have any right to the services of the local govern-
ments.
93
Is the local government obliged, permitted or even banned from providing ser-
vices to non-nationals? This becomes especially significant in individualised services such
as monetary support for the poor.
In addition to this, the most significant income source for local governments in
Turkey is the allocation of resources from the central government, which is calculated
on the basis of the number of ‘nationals’registered as living within the territory of the
locality. As such, there is absolutely no sustainable income for municipalities to
provide any services to non-nationals. As such, any service they provide comes from
the budget allocated to nationals, and from external funding such as EU, UNHCR and
IOM projects.
As a result, Turkish local governments,
i. Have no clearly allocated competences in the realm of migration and integration,
and operate in a thick fog of legal ambiguity with regards to their competence in
providing services to non-nationals;
ii. Have no budget for the non-nationals in their territory and are completely reliant
on external resources; and,
iii. If they do engage in policies of migration and integration (since it is not prohibited
and many local governments find themselves in circumstances of necessity) are left
in legal ambiguity as to their place in the highly centralised asylum and migration-
governance regime. They then often clash with organs of the national government
because it is not even clear whether they can obtain statistical information on the
number of non-nationals or specifically Syrian refugees under temporary protection
registered in their locality from the police (which is under national government
jurisdiction).
1168 E. DURMUŞ

As such, Turkey is clearly a context of low regulation for municipalities engaging with
urban citizenship practices.
5.2. Switzerland
In comparison to Turkey, Switzerland is a high-regulation context, a fact perhaps best
introduced through the anecdotal evidence of an interviewee from the Swiss field
research mentioning the word ‘mandate’without prior tempting seven times in one
thirty-minute interview.
94
Keuffner noted that ‘Switzerland is known for its stability,
most certainly the result of a kind of cultural scepticism towards sweeping change and
of system-inherent institutional impeding factors’.
95
Furthermore, Switzerland’s geo-
graphical location as a ‘fortress’
96
within Europe far from conflict regions makes it
much easier for Switzerland to limit, register, regulate and count every single person
entering the state in a regular manner, as well as handling their asylum applications indi-
vidually. Switzerland also ‘enjoys’benefits of the Dublin procedure, which is an EU regu-
lation that ensures that the first European state in which asylum is sought –which is
coincidentally almost always a border state –should take responsibility for the asylum
seeker or refugee.
97
In line with this, reception and integration of asylum seekers and
refugees are strictly separated in the Swiss context. While reception is a strictly federal
responsibility, integration falls under the jurisdiction of cantons and municipalities.
98
In addition, there is a central dispersal system that allocates a specific number of
persons proportionate to the Swiss population of each canton.
99
The Swiss legal and administrative regime applicable to asylum and migration is
notoriously complex.
100
The legal regime differs from canton to canton significantly,
and even tasks that fall within cantonal and municipal jurisdiction are regulated by
higher (federal and cantonal) laws and regulations.
101
The latest adoption of the Inte-
grationsagenda Schweiz (Integration Agenda Switzerland) (2019) is an excellent
example for this.
102
The Agenda, while increasing the budget per refugee by 200% to
reach 18.000 Francs, also regulates strictly which benchmarks need to be met in the
spending of this money (see Appendix 1, the Cantonal Integration Plan Roster pre-
scribed by the federal level; and Appendix 2, the corresponding Financing Roster; in
the Supplemental Material). This stands in stark contrast to the complete lack of a cen-
trally allocated budget for foreigners in Turkishmunicipalities,aswellasthecomplete
lack of regulation on benchmarks that need to be met in reception or integration.
Alongside these perceptions, it is important to note that Swiss municipal officials per-
ceived the legal competences for municipalities to be extremely clear, indicating low or
no degrees of legal ambiguity.
103
In addition to the clear distinction between reception and integration mentioned
above (or ‘migration vs integration’as my interviewees often adamantly distinguished)
non-nationals in Switzerland are also divided into many different categories in the
Swiss context. While such categorisation can also be seen in the Turkish context (and
in many others, for that matter), the categorisation in the Swiss context surpasses that
of the Turkish context, both in absolute number of categories designated in federal
laws and the relevance of these categories in the practice of different spheres of
government.
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1169

Now, as an overview, let us briefly look into each of the three elements of the opera-
tionalisation of Regulation in the context of Switzerland:
i. In Switzerland, there is an overwhelming repertoire of legal and administrative
norms regulating migration, integration, asylum and the competences of municipa-
lities, often in a highly casuistic manner. In this context, cantons and municipalities
have clearly allocated tasks, that are regulated with benchmarks that need to be met.
ii. Accompanying these explicit (and implicit) competences, a clearly designated
budget is allocated to the municipality per person/year. This budget both enables
and regulates integration policies that can amount to urban citizenship.
iii. Finally, there is a highly regulated division of labour between different organs of the
public administration, and especially between the different spheres of government.
These spheres seem to be highly and perpetually aware of the scope and boundaries
of their competences as well as challenges thereto.
In conclusion, answering all three of the questions above in the positive, Switzerland is
a highly regulated context.
6. The relevance of regulation in the engagement by local governments in
urban citizenship practices
6.1. Perception of competence area and discretionary space
The first finding I observed in relation to the regulatory context has been the divergence
in local governments’perception of their own Discretionary Space and Competence Area.
Tentatively, my findings suggest that the more regulated the country context was, the less
perceived Discretionary Space as well as Competence Area there was for local govern-
ments, regardless of the fact that the absolute Competence Area was higher in the
higher-regulated context.
In the literature review, I discussed how discretionary spaces are increased by legal
ambiguity. This is somewhat a logical and straightforward finding. What is surprising,
however, is that the perception of the Competence Area and Discretionary Space also
increases with legal ambiguity and low regulation. Almost every interviewee in Switzer-
land mentioned at least once that local governments have few competences when it
comes to migration and integration in general, or refugees or undocumented migrants
in particular,
104
despite having many legally prescribed and permitted tasks, especially
in the realms of integration and general service provision (education, transport, health-
care, vocational training, etc.).
105
In contrast, local governments in Turkey have highly
ambiguous competences on migration due to the ambiguity in the Law on Municipalities
(‘nationals’vs ‘co-citizens’), simultaneously obliging and prohibiting local governments
from providing services to non-nationals.
106
Despite this context, or perhaps specifically
because of it, almost every interview participant responded to the question of ‘do local
governments in Turkey have enough competences’along the lines of ‘local governments
can do whatever they set their mind on’.
107
While interviewees from Turkish local governments, city networks and local NGOs
expressed that local governments ‘could do anything’, their Swiss counterparts expressed
1170 E. DURMUŞ

almost uncomfortable awareness of the limits of their competence, repeatedly referring to
regulations and constitutional divisions of labour they are bound by.
108
While this per-
ception can also be informed by the highly regulated context in matters of local compe-
tences on migration, it also reflects findings on general trends concerning a reduction of
perceived autonomy in Swiss municipalities.
109
In fact, this perception has been reported
to be accompanied by a sense that ‘municipal performance has reached its limits in all
areas except culture’.
110
This finding would amount to reaching the limits of the Compe-
tence Area and therefore perceiving less Discretionary Space, in our conceptual frame-
work. Of course, this research cannot claim any direct causal link between the
regulatory context and the perception of discretionary space and competence area, as
the level of regulation is only one amongst many complex and intertwined factors,
both structural and inter- and intrapersonal.
Moving on to our data, there were also exceptions to the majority opinions introduced
above: Some interviewees in Turkey working in municipalities,
111
international organi-
sations
112
and international non-governmental organisations
113
(the latter two perhaps
therefore more inclined or able to compare Turkish local governments in the inter-
national context) highlighted that Turkish local governments’Competence Areas were
not wide enough, and had been decreasing since decentralisation reforms peaked in
the early 2000s.
114
Nonetheless, even those interviewees recognised Turkish local govern-
ments’ability to ‘get results really fast’on humanitarian and rights-based issues, even if
those results may not be sustainable.
115
Similarly, there were exceptions to the majority
opinion in Switzerland, especially among generally optimistic and idealistic interviewees
with entrepreneurial spirits who had already played key roles in urban citizenship and
rights-based governance initiatives at the local level. Those individuals believed in the
possibility of change through local governments, including the underlying assumption
that local governments had the Discretionary Space to enact that change. For instance,
Zürich’s City Card initiative had triggered wide-spread debates on the legality of the pro-
posal, and the question of the local government’s competence to issue such ID cards.
116
Upon the return of two academic expert opinions requested by the City Council, some
persons interpreted the expert opinions as an unequivocal win for the cause, while
other individuals in the campaign were much more hesitant about whether these
opinions would actually hold before Court or persuade opposing political actors.
117
Nonetheless, the general trend of interviewees in Turkeyexpressing a sense of wide auton-
omy and power attributed local governments vs the general trend in Switzerland of intervie-
wees making reserved, deferring statements and pointing repeatedly towards the boundaries
of their competences was widely observable. This observation indicates that the authority
local governments have in interpreting higher-level laws,
118
which Orgad drew attention
to, might correlate more with local governments’perception of their own autonomy than
the actual competences they enjoy in the constitutional division of labour.
119
Discretionary
Spaces may thus be more important than Competence Area for perceived autonomy.
This finding can be important for policy-making. If proactive and engaged local gov-
ernance and higher decentralisation and autonomy is wished for in a context, over-regu-
lation should be avoided. While the second element of regulation, namely the availability
of sufficient funds and budget for urban citizenship practices, is still necessary for engage-
ment, if this income comes with micromanagement on its usage (such as through
detailed benchmarks and limitations on how exactly the budget should/may be spent),
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1171

while it may achieve a higher minimum standard throughout the state, it may hold back
those who wish to be creative and do more and for wider groups of beneficiaries (See
Section 6(c) below). Explaining this phenomenon with a simple reductionism of regu-
lation leading to less proactivity might be short-sighted. Rather, it is possible that legal
ambiguity and a severe lack of resources, in combination with high and urgent needs
on the ground, have contributed to pushing Turkish local governments towards more
entrepreneurial, experimental solutions.
120
While some governance scholars believe
that institutional systems are so resistant to change that crises are necessary for
reform,
121
I am not sure a desperation-induced productivity is a setting to be strived
for by legislators (re)producing jurisdictional boundaries for local governments.
Additionally, the overreliance in the Turkish context on specific individuals (especially
the Mayor) and insufficient institutionalisation within local governments,
122
are risks
for the sustainability and democratic basis of urban citizenship practices.
123
6.2. Legal vs extra-legal exercise of discretion
The second, and perhaps quite straightforward finding arising from this study on the rel-
evance of regulation on urban citizenship practices, was whether the engagement with
urban citizenship was clearly and completely foreseen within the boundaries of the
law, or whether the action fell outside the types of acts and omissions described, pre-
scribed, permitted or prohibited by the law.
In previous work, we had conceptualised the legal –extra-legal distinction as an axis of
legality in our mapping of the strategies of divergence applied by local governments in their
engagement with migration and integration.
124
As we had already disclaimed in that work,
the line between acts and omissions that are permitted by law and those that are not can be
very blurry in instances of legal ambiguity.
125
This is the reason why the term ‘extra-legal’
was selected, as opposed to ‘illegal’.
126
The term ‘extra-legal’thus includes actions that may
well be perfectly legal, as long as they were not foreseen by legislators, and not widely inter-
preted as being part and parcel of the legal mandate of the municipality.
In Turkey, many urban citizenship practices fall in this ‘extra-legal’category. The risk
associated with this is not considered high, as those holding political power at the central
government (primarily President Erdoğan) have been enacting and favouring a refugee-
welcoming policy, and thus not closely surveilling potential local government activities
going ‘too far’in welcoming and integrating refugees.
127
There has, for example, not
been any instance of the Court of Cassation, the body responsible for monitoring
public spending, shutting down any spending in favour of migrants and refugees.
128
This could almost be interpreted as an acceptance that providing services to non-
nationals is indeed permitted within Turkish domestic law. Nonetheless, due to the
lack of detailed regulation on competences and budgets of local governments, especially
when it comes to non-nationals, local governments can often –of course, once they crea-
tively find sufficient budget and expertise –provide services that could be understood as
practices strengthening urban citizenship, in quite a diverse number of ways.
129
Such
‘extra-legal’practices can include the local government establishing an NGO to apply
for foreign funding to provide services to refugees, negotiating problems and solutions
with informally elected ‘Syrian Mayors’within Turkish cities, providing services to individ-
uals without formal documentation (see Section 6(c)) and cooperating with international
1172 E. DURMUŞ

organisations to launch vast vocational training centres or migrant one-stop shops within
the facilities of the local government.
130
All this also means that Turkish local government
practices do not enjoy much initial legal and political deliberation (and often no legislative
process) and are instead developed more organically through collaborations between the
administrations and third parties. As one interviewee with extensive experience in local
governments and founder of a pro-decentralisation NGO put it:
In Turkey, one local government does something. If the Court of Cassation says nothing,
and it seems like a good practice, others pick it up because they don’t want to be considered
to have fallen behind. As more and more local governments do it, it has now become a local
government competence.
131
On the other hand, in Switzerland, the engagement of local governments with urban
citizenship is overwhelmingly legal and regulated, often passing through the local legis-
lative organ before becoming a practice or policy of the local executive, and continuously
facing scrutiny and supervision from both local organs and mechanisms such as the city
legislative, ombudsperson, or local referenda, as well as from external actors from the
cantonal and national authorities, including courts.
132
Swiss local governments seem
to need to undertake much more preparation before enacting urban citizenship policies
and practices, researching in depth whether they are permitted to take the action and
whether they have already passed necessary formal legal processes.
133
Even after receiv-
ing full authorisation, there is continued risk for legal challenges, as many political differ-
ences in the country seem to translate into legal battles.
134
This makes it much more
difficult for Swiss local governments to push the boundaries of their Competence Areas
unnoticed (see the Challenges to Competence Areas in Figure 1, above), and through
the power of time and de facto realities obtain more playing room through initial ‘trans-
gressions’. Perhaps the best example for this is the City Card processes ongoing in Zürich
and Bern. In Zürich, the idea was introduced by a cultural project that led to the devel-
opment of a grassroots platform of advocacy for a ‘Züri City Card’that could serve as an
identification for every resident of the city, including undocumented migrants.
135
The
city now boasts a thorough, deeply participatory and legalised process involving civil
society, extensive deliberations in the city legislative, deep engagement, research and
preparation by the city administration, a planned local referendum, and even input in
form of expert opinions from the legal departments of the prestigious academic insti-
tution ETH.
136
Despite all this, the central government contests the legality of the initiat-
ive, as displayed in answers to multiple questionnaires by the federal legislative organ, the
Bundesrat: ‘The “City Card”is an initiative of the City of Zürich that is not founded in
federal law. (…) Such IDs would therefore not be legally binding and no lawful residence
can be derived from them, The introduction of such a card as an identification instru-
ment would therefore violate federal law’.
137
This places the City Card initiative on the
boundary between legal and extra-legal practices, but with legality explicitly contested,
rather than implicitly tested. Thus, we could conclude that if Swiss municipalities
would wish to test, challenge or expand the (proclaimed) limits of their competence,
they are unlikely to be permitted to continue in legal ambiguity, and their practice will
quickly be moved to the realm of legal argumentation.
The regulated context in Switzerland also makes it more difficult for Swiss municipa-
lities and cantons to respond to crises. For example, in the Summer of 2015 when there
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was an increased flow of asylum seekers arriving in the city, Geneva decided to build
accommodation centres, but by the time this decision had jumped through the many
legal and bureaucratic loops, the asylum seekers were already in the City and in need
of accommodation.
138
The canton then had to urgently house these persons in under-
ground bunkers designed to protect the Swiss from bombings, despite the fact that it
was a hot summer as well as Ramadan.
139
Of course, deliberative processes are necessary for a healthy democracy, the rule of
law, checks and balances, and institutionalisation. Swiss municipalities also operate in
an environment of so many norms: legal, administrative, fiscal; from national, cantonal,
local organs as well as large horizontal conglomerations of special bureaucrats. They
would have to be very creative to produce and be able to implement completely novel
practices and policies that have never come up and been reflected on in any of those regu-
latory processes and protocols.
What is noteworthy as a final point, was the perception among some interviewees from
civil society, that the cantonal administrations of the City-States Basel and Geneva who
seem to try to uphold a face of strict abidance of the law and a tougher stance to irregular
migration, were likely supporting irregular migrants on an individual or structural basis
within their territories, for example by not pursing ID-checks and ‘looking the other
way’frequently.
140
I have however not seen any formal evidence or confession by the can-
tonal authorities of such a policy. If the rumours are true, this would reflect similar prac-
tices of avoiding ‘paper trails’among Dutch municipalities,
141
and indicate that extra-legal
practices of urban citizenship might be pursued by Swiss Kantonstädte who feel the
pressure of the self-identification with the state and the need to uphold regulations.
6.3. Distinguishing between categories of rights-holders
Another result of the regulatory context on urban citizenship practices, and the one most
significant perhaps for positive human rights law (and therefore the ECHR), was whether
and how (much) local governments distinguished between different categories of people
present in their territory, and therefore assigned them different sets of rights. In discuss-
ing the Discretionary Space for local governments and the thereby-resulting divergences
across the map in Switzerland, Basel’s Cantonal Director responsible for asylum policies,
Renata Gäumann kindly explained to me how cantons and municipalities can diverge on
which legal categories of persons to cover with their social aid policies, who to spend
money on. When I asked what Basel was doing, she said ‘We take everybody’. When I
asked if this meant undocumented migrants also, she said ‘No! That’s a completely
different topic. I am not responsible for that, that’s a very different topic’. In contrast,
many Turkish municipalities in my field research provided services to ‘newcomers’
142
or ‘migrants’
143
or ‘refugees’
144
without examining their official legal status and dis-
tinguishing between those documented and undocumented. In Bağcılar Municipality,
social aid in form of essential household furniture and food as well as financial
support was given, accompanied by humanitarian and religious motives, to the families
the local government had been made aware of, by neighbours or NGOs, without a check
for legal status. The Municipality of Zeytinburnu in Istanbul had a ‘Welcome to the
Town’Office, which determined what services the individual (language courses, etc.)
would need for their integration, without asking for any official papers or status. The
1174 E. DURMUŞ

Municipality of Şişli had a health care centre that provided anonymous HIV-testing and
basic healthcare.
145
The Municipality of Keçiören, Adana Metropolitan Municipality,
and Sanliurfa Metropolitan Municipality cooperated with the IOM to establish ‘one-
stop-shops’for ‘migrants’which offered support to non-nationals of every background
and legal status.
146
Similarly, the urban citizenship practices of Zürich and Bern, as well as to some extent
the Municipality of Geneva (as opposed to the canton) often proudly underlined the una-
pologetically inclusive principles, as well as the presumption of belonging, derived from
urban citizenship.
147
This was despite cantonal authorities in the city-states of Basel and
Geneva seeming much more aware of higher level laws and regulations, at times co-legis-
lated by themselves, framing their permitted courses of action. As an interviewee from
the municipality of Geneva expressed, the cantons have ‘(…) not just a little bit, [but]
a lot of power to oppose. They are put in place to represent the population that lives
in the canton. They do not want to oppose, often also because they have other obli-
gations’.
148
These other obligations seemed to include having a stricter, tougher approach
towards migration. While the Cantons of Basel and Geneva had many more pathways
and formal competences to directly engage with federal authorities, both on generalised
and individual cases of migration, they seemed more hesitant to act as rebelliously and
unapologetically as their municipal counterparts governing almost the same population,
as if their legal status as cantons had brought about an obligatory ‘stateliness’and weight
to their behaviour. Interviewees from cantonal authorities made more references to the
‘state’as an entity including them, showing ownership and self-identification with the
state.
149
This seems to lead them to more loyally continue and implement the categoris-
ations set by federal and cantonal laws in assigning differentiated groups of rights to
persons inhabiting their territories.
Related is also the higher level of institutionalisation in Swiss cantonal and also
municipal governments, compared to many in the Turkish field research. Spending tax-
payers’money needs to be especially diligently accounted for in democratic and institu-
tionalised (local) governance. Swiss federal and cantonal laws as well as regulations are
often extremely prescriptive as well as restrictive on the question of exactly what services
would be delivered to which persons and where the money would come from. On the one
hand, this can provide more security for persons who are eligible to receive a regular
support from local authorities, as opposed to the common short- and mid-term-ness
amongst Turkish municipalities, dependant on the continuation of external funding
from a project as well as the continued permission of the Mayor.
The latest Integrationsagenda Schweiz adopted in Switzerland demonstrates the link
between an increase in allocated resources (enabling sustainability and continuity of ser-
vices) and reduction in discretionary spaces (enabling the exercise of agency): The budget
to be given to the municipal authorities per refugee per year increased from 6.000 to
18.000 Francs, while the question of how this money would be spent also became
more strictly regulated, via detailed benchmarks (see Appendices 1 and 2). This does,
however, also mean: ‘If you are an asylum seeker in in a federal centre, you got 3
Francs a day. If you were with the canton, 15 Francs a day. If you were a recognised
refugee, the canton now has 18000 Francs to spend on you yearly’.
150
A similar effect can be seen in the intended ‘capacity-building’and ‘institutionalising’
side-effect of projects developed for/with local governments in Turkey by the EU,
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1175

UNHCR, IOM and other external institutions. At times, municipalities in Turkey want to
use resources in ways that they best see fit with the aim of reducing political and social
tension in the locality, such as by offering services jointly to Turkish and Syrian residents,
while, as the Vice-Mayor of Bağcılar complained:
EU funds say you “have”to use the money “only”for Syrians, and you have to very strictly
write it down and demonstrate it. But we know that it is better to have projects that target
both Syrian and Turkish populations, for local cohesion. That’s why we don’t prefer EU
projects.
151
In contrast, the vocational training centre project co-organised by UNHCR and Ankara
Metropolitan Municipality trained Syrian refugees and Turkish citizens side-by-side for
vocations that were most needed in the city’s industrial production centres.
152
The
success of that project, along with many others, is an additional point in favour of
migration and integration policies developed in ways that don’t contribute to but seek
to remove categorisations between groups of inhabitants.
6.4. Engagement with urban citizenship: Upwards, downwards and horizontal
Finally, the field research has shown that regulation can shape in which direction local
governments engage with urban citizenship: upwards, downwards or horizontal.
‘Upwards’engagement refers here to the engagement of local governments (including
city-states) with higher levels of government –the national, the federal, and if applicable,
the regional –with an aim to influence higher-level laws and policies that regulate and
limit their discretionary spaces and competence areas. While local governance in its
ideal form is horizontal and participatory, for the purposes of this Article, ‘downward’
practices of urban citizenship are the engagement directed towards governing the locality
and the inhabitants within. This includes all policies, discourses, administrative practices
that aim to directly realise the local government’s understanding of urban citizenship in
their locality. Finally, horizontal engagement refers to the engagement with urban citi-
zenship with other local governments as addressees.
Swiss democracy and governance has a strong culture of deliberation, and Swiss local
governments, even the specific departments such as the departments of social affairs,
have their own conferences that take place regularly and set norms and standards to be
applied by all. This practice that constitutes norm-generation in the subject-matter of
urban citizenship adds to the rich, complex and layered regulatory system surrounding
local government activity. Thus, ‘regulation’, understood as law-making concerning both
substance and jurisdiction, comes not only from above but also from local government col-
lectives. In addition to their obvious role in shaping downward engagement, these confer-
ences also facilitate local governments’engagement upwards. For instance, the more ad hoc
‘Cities Alliance’that was formed in relation to the desire to relocate and welcome refugees
from the infamous Moria refugee camp,
153
also continued its activities in relation to the
refugees fleeing Taliban’s capture of Kabul in December 2021.
154
This Alliance was able
to speak with a unified voice and call upon the cantons and the central government to
resettle more refugees, especially to these localities that announced themselves ready to
welcome.
155
This wish, nonetheless, was denied repeatedly, with the argument that
migration was a federal task and cities had no jurisdiction on this matter.
156
1176 E. DURMUŞ

Perhaps this strict approach to the division of labour between public authorities and
the national government’s reluctance to give in to the wishes of migrant-friendly, diverse
and progressive local governments, had been a factor in the cantonal administrations of
city-states (in our case –Geneva and Basel) to choose to engage upwards, leveraging their
power as cantonal authorities, rather than engaging downwards and be considered as
‘rebelling’against higher levels of government. For instance, while the local civil
society of Basel expressed frustration with the cantonal authorities in their non-accessi-
bility and non-cooperation with regards to the issues of undocumented migrants,
157
the
Cantonal Director responsible for Asylum Issues of Basel had been very active in the
drafting of the new Integrationsagenda Schweiz with other cantonal and federal auth-
orities.
158
This new nation-wide programme stipulated a 200% increase of budget for
cantons for integration purposes, as well as reducing divergence by increasing the nation-
wide minimum standard of services that were obligatory to be provided for persons in the
asylum system by local governments and cantons.
159
The Canton of Geneva on the other
hand led the successful project ‘Papyrus’in order to assist in the regularisation of undocu-
mented migrants, by obliging employers of undocumented migrants (rather than the sans
papiers themselves) to report their undocumented employees, without being fined, for a
limited period of time.
160
The canton then used its exceptional competence to issue rec-
ommendations of regularisation to the central government for undocumented individuals
who fulfilled the criteria of the project.
161
This was a trailblazing project that the central
government later had to admit was lawful and within the canton’s competence.
162
These
upwards engagements by Switzerland’s City-States could be explained by the strict and
clearly delineated division of labour between public authorities (the third element of the
operationalisation of regulation), leading those few local actors: the Kantonstädte –to
use some of their official competences to engage upwards rather than seek to dwell in
legally unregulated or controversial territory. Swiss municipalities on the other hand use
their horizontal engagement with each other to strengthen their voice in the larger
system and upwards towards the central government, but face with clearly shut doors.
Thus, what remains for them is a limited discretionary space in downwards engagement,
in which they seek to push the few blurred lines of their competence explicitly and
implicitly, without attracting the attention of the ever vigilant central government.
On the other hand, in the Turkish context, almost the only direction of engagement
with urban citizenship was downwards. With the exceptions of the cooperation with
international organisations, city networks, and local and international civil society –
almost all of which were initiated by parties other than municipalities
163
–urban citizen-
ship was only a practice directed towards inhabitants of the city, often quiet, implicit,
without the necessity of serious legal engagement with the competences of the local gov-
ernment, and without intervention by the central government. This type of engagement
often resulted in off-the-record services and policies for documented and undocumented
migrants in the locality, as well as reduced sustainability of the practices. The Turkish
municipalities also had no systems or facilities whatsoever in creating collective stan-
dards and norms amongst each other. Without the lack of any strong decentralised
bodies like the Swiss cantons and Canton-Cities, local governments only upward engage-
ment constituted of practices such as inviting the Director of Migration Management of
the central government for a conference they organised and expressing their struggles
and requests addressed to these higher officials in such opportunities.
164
These practices
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had very limited reach and were only viable for local governments with the same political
position as the central government enjoying access to back-door diplomacy.
7. Conclusion
Perhaps the most important conclusion of this research is that regulation matters in local
governments’abilities and choices in engaging with progressive policies such as urban
citizenship practices. The regulatory context affects how local governments perceive
their own competence areas as well as their discretionary spaces, with an anti-pro-
portional relationship between the level of regulation and this perception. This finding
provides further evidence to the proposition that absolute competence area and per-
ceived autonomy are two very different concepts.
165
Regulation can also affect whether and to what extent local governments distinguish
between different categories of persons present or residing in their territory, an issue
which touches upon the essence of the concept of urban citizenship, as it implies a pre-
sumption of belonging and equality between inhabitants. When local governments adopt
formal distinctions between their inhabitants, they legitimate differentiated levels of
access to and enjoyment of rights by those people. In that case, a citizen will not have
the same rights as a non-national, a highly-skilled migrant not the same rights as a
migrant worker, a refugee not the same rights as an asylum seeker, and an undocumented
migrant not the same rights as any member of the other categories. This then aligns the
local government’s understanding of citizenship and rights with the state-centric para-
digm, and away from a radical understanding of equality. My findings suggest that
rigid, high-regulation settings can force local governments to adopt such distinctions,
thus forcing the local government to act more state-like. This was however more the
case in Switzerland among the studied cantonal authorities of City-States, than among
municipalities within cantons of larger, heterogenous territories.
Regulation also informs whether local governments chose to engage with urban citizen-
ship in means that are foreseen by the law or not (legal or extra-legal) and what the direc-
tion of the engagement is (upwards, downwards or horizontal). A City–State like Basel
might seek to negotiate with peers and higher levels of government by taking an active
seat at the table and shaping the new Integration Agenda, while a cosmopolitan city like
Zürich in a large and mostly rural canton may opt more towards downwards, implicit
and at times extra-legal ways of engagement, such as providing services for sans papiers
even though it may clash with higher-level laws and regulations. In my data, the high-regu-
lation context of Switzerland with little legal ambiguity and without formal pathways of
influence for local governments towards other levels of governance seemed to push local
governments to seek more informal alliances among each other in a bid to cultivate lever-
age, engage in extra-legal downwards engagement, and take very formal legal positions vis-
à-vis the State. On the other hand, the low-regulation context of Turkey gave local govern-
ments more space to engage in the realm between the legal and extra-legal, without having
to take defensive legal positions or seek alliances inother cities. The regulatory context thus
shaped what options are possible, feasible, convenient and effective.
Here, it is important to note that my analysis only considered the regulation-density of
a country context, and did not consider each locality individually. Thus, within the
Turkish context, metropolitan municipalities might be more regulated, and in
1178 E. DURMUŞ

Switzerland, cantonal governments of City-States certainly demonstrated differences in
approach to their municipal counterparts in other large cities throughout the country.
Further research is necessary in identifying distinctions within national contexts, and
how regulatory frameworks affect local governments of different administrative statuses
differently. In this piece, while there are interesting findings pointing towards differences,
the results are not conclusive, especially in the Turkish context.
It is an important shortcoming of this research that only one small- or medium-scale
locality was included: Illnau-Effretikon in Switzerland. All other localities in Turkey and
Switzerland were larger urbanities. More research is necessary to see if regulation is a rel-
evant factor in smaller places as well, perhaps in comparison to other, potentially more
impactful factors such as fewer resources, less expertise and a different local demographic
composition.
This leads us to the contributions of this Article to literature. The conceptual framework
proposed in this Article proved to be quite helpful in dissecting and operationalising the
concept and context of regulatory regimes. Against the backdrop of scholarship on urban
citizenship and human rights at the local level struggling to settle on and utilise systemati-
cally concepts with clear definitions and specification on the question of local autonomy, the
conceptual framework visualised in Figure 1 can provide a good, workable tool to further
explore and communicate the role of regulation in how local governments (can) behave.
Such further research and exploration is essential for a proper understanding of regulatory
contexts’relevance for local government behaviour both in the field of migration and else-
where. As such, scholars of the law, policy, politics and sociology; especially those exploring
outstanding, progressive or reformist local governments; could benefitfromfollowingtheir
suspicion that the regulation of local government competences matters, and move forward
to exploring how and how much it matters, and what the consequences could be.
Furthermore, scholars of international and European human rights law may find
many rich examples of radical interpretations of equal access to rights (such as the
rights to health, housing, political participation, etc.) by local governments under the
paradigm of urban citizenship, which may be invisible to those seeking explicit references
to human rights in their research. Urban citizenship practices can indeed and often do
constitute implementations and interpretations of different human rights, and this prac-
tice, often through the observations of international organisations and through academia,
can feed back into mainstream positive international human rights law to enrich and
inform its development. Strengthening these pathways and contributing to such knowl-
edge exchange can contribute to a more multifaceted and grounded contestation and
therefore progressive development of human rights. The long-term potential of local
governments’radical and state-defying interpretations of equality, belonging and deserv-
ingness in access to rights, towards influencing more mainstream interpretations of
human rights at different governance levels, is also worth further exploration.
Finally, it is very important to remember that regulatory contexts are not fixed in time
and space. They are indeterminate and contested. They can (be) change(d), especially
when challenged, either by implicit or explicit acceptance of the new and wider discre-
tionary spaces for local governments, or by the State fighting back to retake power.
Therefore, the role of regulation and the interactions between progressive urban citizen-
ship practices and regulatory contexts should be evaluated not only unidirectionally but
also in their mutual influences on each other and their dynamism. While the purpose of
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1179

this Article was not to tackle that multidirectional complexity entirely, other works have
already started to explore such complexity, and more depth and breadth in data and
analysis is needed in the field.
166
Notes
1. M. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”vis-à-vis Undocumented Migration’,Citi-
zenship Studies 10, no. 2 (2006): 229–49; R. Bauböck, ‘Reinventing Urban Citizenship’,Citi-
zenship Studies no. 7 (2003): 139–60; R. Bauböck and L. Orgad, eds., Cities vs States: Should
Urban Citizenship be Emancipated from Nationality?, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced
Studies, Global Governance Programme-386 GLOBALCIT, EUI Working Papers RSCAS
2020/16, 2020; H. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship: A Path to Migrant Inclusion’, in Bauböck
and Orgad, Cities vs States, 2020; R. A. and A. Bounds, ‘Urban citizenship’,inDemocracy,
Citizenship and the Global City, ed. E. Isin (New York: Routledge, 2000); J. Brodie, ‘Imagin-
ing Democratic Urban Citizenship’,inDemocracy, Citizenship and the Global City,
ed. E. Isin (2000); B. Oomen, ‘Cities of Refuge: Rights, Culture and the Creation of Cosmo-
politan Cityzenship’,inCulture, Citizenship and Human Rights, eds. R. Buikema, A. Buyse,
A.C.G.M. Robben (Routledge, 2019); M. Prak, Citizens Without Nations. Urban Citizenship
in Europe and the World, c. 1000-1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); K.
Stahl, ‘Citizenship Federalism and the Ambiguous Promise of Local Citizenship’,in
Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States, 2020; M. Purcell, ‘Citizenship and the Right to the
Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order’,International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research, no. 27 (2003): 564–90.
2. Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States.
3. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’, 231 calls this ‘grounded, rather than
“bounded”’ citizenship. While urban citizenship has received renewed attention in
modern times, its history dates back far beyond that of nation states: See Prak, Citizens
Without Nations.
4. Ibid., Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’.
5. B. Oomen (2020), ‘The Next Step: Coupling City-zenship to Human Rights’, in Bauböck and
Orgad, Cities vs States.
6. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’.
7. L. Pedroza, Citizenship Beyond Nationality. Immigrants’Right to Vote Across the World
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019); R. Bauböck, From Aliens to Citizens:
Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe (Brookfield, MA: Avebury, 1994).
8. H. LeFevbre, Le droit à la ville –Suivi de Espace et Politique (Points, 1968); Z. Bauman,
‘Urban Space Wars: On Destructive Order and Creative Chaos’,Citizenship Studies, no. 3
(1999): 173–86; Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’.
9. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’; Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’; H. Bauder and
D. A. Gonzalez, ‘Municipal responses to “Illegality”: Urban Sanctuary Across National Con-
texts’,Social Inclusion 6, no. 1 (2018): 124–34; E. Gargiulo and L. Piccoli, ‘Mean Cities: The
Dark Side of Urban Citizenship’, in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States, 2020; J. Darling and
H. Bauder, Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles: Rescaling Migration, Citizenship, and
Rights (Manchester University Press, 2019); E. de Graauw, ‘Municipal ID Cards for Undo-
cumented Immigrants: Local Bureaucratic Membership in a Federal System’Politics and
Society 42, no. 3 (2014): 309–30; Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’;Oomen ‘Coupling
City-zenship to Human Rights’.
10. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’; Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’;
Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’.
11. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 23 (emphasis mine).
12. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’, 245.
13. A. T. Aleinikoff,‘Local Citizenship Needs Local Sovereignty’in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities
vs States, 2020, 52.
1180 E. DURMUŞ

14. C. Marchetti, ‘Cities of Exclusion: Are Local Authorities Refusing Asylum Seekers?’,in
Migration, Borders and Citizenship –Between Policy and Public Spheres. Migration, Dia-
sporas and Citizenship, eds. M. Ambrosini, M. Cinalli, D. Jacobson (Cham: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22157-7_11; Gargiulo and Piccoli, ‘Mean
Cities’; Bauder and Gonzalez, ‘Municipal responses to “Illegality”’; M. Ambrosini, ‘“We
Are Against a Multi-Ethnic Society”: Policies of Exclusion at the Urban Level in Italy’,
Ethnic and Racial Studies 36, no. 1 (2013): 136–55, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.644312;
de Graauw, ‘Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants’; L. Orgad, ‘A Political
Promise or a Hollow Hope?’in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States, 2020.
15. R. T. Ford, ‘City-States and Citizenship’,inCitizenship Today: Global Perspectives and Prac-
tices, eds. T. A. Aleinikoffand D. Klusmeyer (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 2001); R. Hirschl, City, State: Constitutionalism and the Megacity
(OUP, 2020); D. Kaufmann and D. Strebel, ‘Urbanising Migration Policy-Making: Urban
Policies in Support of Irregular Migrants in Geneva and Zürich’,Urban Studies 58, no. 14
(2021): 2991–3008. doi:10.1177/0042098020969342; Marchetti, ‘Cities of Exclusion’;B.
Oomen, M. Baumgärtel, S. Miellet, E. Durmuş, and T. Sabchev, ‘Strategies Of Divergence:
Local Authorities, Law, and Discretionary Spaces in Migration Governance’,Journal of
Refugee Studies (2021b): feab062, https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/feab062.
16. Gargiulo and Piccoli, ‘Mean Cities’; Stahl, ‘Citizenship Federalism and the Ambiguous’;
Marchetti, ‘Cities of Exclusion’; Oomen et al., ‘Strategies of Divergence’.
17. Field research for Geneva (Summer 2019) and Bern (Summer 2020) were conducted by
Natalia Burduli and Lea Jörg respectively, for their Senior Projects at University College
Roosevelt. Both Natalia Burduli and Lea Joerg conducted this research for their Bachelor’s
Theses, and were supervised by me in this process. I am deeply thankful for the pleasure of
supervising their hard work and for their academic collegiality and generosity with regards
to the data they collected as part of the Cities of Refuge research. All other field research was
done by the author between November 2018 and February 2019.
18. Human Rights Council, Role of Local Government in the Promotion and Protection of
Human Rights –Final Report of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee, UN
Doc. A/HRC/30/49, 7 August 2015, para 8.
19. I would like to thank Margherita Götze, an excellent graduate of University College Roose-
velt, who scanned the online municipal archives of Zürich and Basel for me as a Summer job
in July-August 2021.
20. Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
21. www.citiesofrefuge.eu 2017–2022. Funded by the Netherlands Scientific Organisation
(NWO), my excellent former team consisted of Prof. Dr. Barbara Oomen, with Dr.
Moritz Baumgärtel, Dr Sara Miellet, Dr Tihomir Sabchev, and Gladys Ngare.
22. K. Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory (Sage, 2006).
23. W. Magnusson, The Search for Political Space (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996);
P. Schuck, The Devaluation of American Citizenship, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens:
Essays on Immigration and Citizenship (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); R. Dagger,
‘Metropolis, Memory and Citizenship’,inDemocracy, Citizenship and the Global City,
ed. E. F. Isin (New York: Routledge, 2000); E. W. Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of
Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Bauböck, ‘Reinventing Urban Citizenship’;
Purcell, ‘Citizenship and the Right to the Global City’; S. Sassen, ‘The Repositioning of Citi-
zenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics’,CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2
(2003): 41–66; S. Bashevkin, ‘Training a Spotlight on Urban Citizenship: The Case of
Women in London and Toronto’,International Journal of Urban and Regional Research,
29, no. 1 (2005): 9–25; T. Bender, ‘Intellectuals, Cities, and Citizenship in the United
States: the 1890s and 1990s’,inCities and Citizenship, ed. J. Holston (Durham and
London: Duke University Press, 1999); M. Thom, ‘City, Region, and Nation: Carlo Cattaneo
and the Making of Italy’,Citizenship Studies, 3 (1999): 187–202; Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating
“Urban Citizenship”’,Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’, Darling and Bauder, Sanctuary
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1181

Cities and Urban Struggles; Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States; Bauder and Gonzalez,
‘Municipal responses to “Illegality”’.
24. R. Bauböck, ‘In Defence of Multilevel Citizenship –A Rejoinder’, in Bauböck and Orgad,
Cities vs States, 2020b.
25. R. Bauböck, ‘Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship be Emancipated from Nationality?’,
in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States, 2020a.
26. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’.
27. Ibid.
28. Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States.
29. H. P. Aust, ‘Urban Citizenship: A Status or Practice?’, in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States,
2020.
30. Bauböck, ‘Reinventing Urban Citizenship’; H. Bauder, ‘Why We Should Use the Term
‘Illegalized’Refugee or Immigrant’,International Journal of Refugee Law 26, no. 3 (2014):
327–32; Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’; Bauböck, From Aliens to Citizens;
R. Bauböck and J. Rundell, Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 1998); Brodie, ‘Imagining Democratic Urban Citizenship’; Ford, ‘City-States
and Citizenship’; Purcell, ‘Citizenship and the Right to the Global City’.
31. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 22; Bauböck, ‘Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship’; Var-
sanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’;Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’, Warren
Magnusson, cited in Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’.
32. LeFevbre, Le droit à la ville, 590; Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’, 239–40.
33. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 22.
34. Ibid.
35. Bauböck, ‘Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship’, 4 (emphasis mine).
36. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’.
37. Brodie, ‘Imagining Democratic Urban Citizenship’; Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citi-
zenship”’; De Graauw, ‘Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants’; Bauder and
Gonzalez, ‘Municipal responses to “Illegality”’; Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’,
Darling and Bauder, Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles; Kaufmann and Strebel, ‘Urbanis-
ing Migration Policy-Making’; E. Durmuş,‘How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take
Root: Local Governments and Refugees in Turkey’,inMyth or Lived Reality, eds. C.
Boost, A. Broderick, F. Coomans, R. Moerland (The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2021)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-447-1_6; B. Oomen, M. Baumgärtel, and E. Durmuş,
‘Accelerating Cities, Constitutional Brakes? Local Authorities Between Global Challenges
and Domestic Law’,inEuropean Yearbook of Constitutional Law 2020, vol 2, eds. Hirsch
Ballin E., van der SchyffG., Stremler M., De Visser M. (T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague,
2021a). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-431-0_12; Oomen et al., ‘Strategies Of
Divergence.
38. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 23.
39. W. Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, (New York: Zone Books, 2017), 3; and N. De
Genova, ‘The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and Freedom of Movement’,inThe
Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and Freedom of Movement, eds. De Genova, N and
Peutz, N. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 33–64. both cited in Bauder, ‘Urban Citi-
zenship’, 23.
40. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’,23
41. Interview Franziska Teuscher (Municipality Bern), November 2020.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 22.
47. Bauder, ‘Urban Citizenship’, 22; B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 4; de Shalit, A., (2020), ‘Thinking
1182 E. DURMUŞ

Like a City, Thinking Like a State’in Bauböck and Orgad, Cities vs States; Bauböck, ‘Cities vs
States: Should Urban Citizenship’.
48. Varsanyi, ‘Interrogating “Urban Citizenship”’. See (also) 231, in which she chose three types of
US sub-national government practices of urban citizenship: ‘(1) the contemporary struggle to
reinstate local noncitizen voting, (2) the increasing acceptance of the matriculas consulares as
a valid form of identification for undocumented Mexican residents, and the debates over
whether or not states should (3) issue driver licenses to undocumented migrants and (4)
allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition for public colleges and universities’.
49. Pedroza, Citizenship Beyond Nationality.
50. de Graauw, ‘Municipal ID Cards for Undocumented Immigrants’.
51. Oomen, ‘Cosmopolitan Cityzenship’.
52. ECtHR, Guide on Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights and on Article 1 of
Protocol No. 12 of the Convention, Updated on 31 August 2022, 6–7, para.3.
53. ECtHR, Sidabras and Džiautas v. Lithuania, 2004; ECtHR, Bigaeva v. Greece, 2009.
54. ECtHR, Andrejeva v. Latvia [GC], 2009; ECtHR, Gaygusuz v. Austria, 1996; ECtHR, Koua
Poirrez v. France, 2003; Stummer v. Austria [GC], 2011
55. ECtHR D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic [GC], 2007; ECtHR, Oršušand Others
v. Croatia [GC], 2010; ECtHR Ponomaryovi v. Bulgaria, 2011.
56. ECtHR, Guide to Art.14.
57. ECtHR, Bah v. UK, 2006, para.45; Yannis Ktistakis, Protecting Migrants under the European
Convention on Human Rights and the European Social Charter: A Handbook for Legal Prac-
titioners (2013), Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 14–15; ECHtHR, Fawsie v. Greece
and Saoudin v. Greece, 28 October 2010. See also ECtHR Guide on Art. 14, 48, para. 214:
‘Finally, the Court found violations of Article 14 in conjunction with Article 3 of Protocol
No. 1 and/or Article 1 of Protocol No. 12 in several cases related to the ability to standfor elec-
tions (Sejdićand Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina [GC], 2009, which concerned the inability of
a Roma and a Jew to stand for parliamentary elections; Zornićv. Bosnia and Herzegovina,
2014, which concerned the ineligibility to stand for election without declaration of affiliation
to one of the constitutionally defined ‘constituent peoples’;Baralija v. Bosnia and Herzegovina,
2019, which concerned the impossibility to vote or stand in local elections due to the appli-
cant’s place of residence; Danis and Association of Ethnic Turks v. Romania, 2015, and
Cegolea v. Romania, 2020, concerning the additional eligibility requirement applicable
solely to candidates of national minority organisations not already represented in Parliament)
and related to the right to vote (Aziz v. Cyprus, 2004, concerning the impossibility for Turkish
Cypriots to vote in parliamentary elections; Selygenenko and Others v. Ukraine, 2021, concern-
ing the discriminatory refusal to allow internally displaced persons to vote in local elections at
their place of actual residence)’.
58. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York:Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973).
59. Bauböck, ‘Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship’,3.
60. Bauböck, ‘In Defence of Multilevel Citizenship’, 79 (emphasis mine).
61. Aleinikoff,‘Local Citizenship Needs Local Sovereignty’, 52.
62. Orgad, ‘A Political Promise or a Hollow Hope?’, 78.
63. H. Motomura, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford: OUP, 2016); Oomen et al., ‘Strategies
of Divergence, 2.
64. N. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives? Evi-
dence from Switzerland’,International Journal of Public Sector Management 31 no. 4
(2017): 426–47; N. Keuffner and K. Horber-Papazian, ‘The Bottom-Up Approach: Essential
to an Apprehension of Local Autonomy and Local Governance in the Case of Switzerland’,
Local Government Studies, 46 no. 2 (2020): 306-325, DOI: 10.1080/03003930.2019.1635019;
K. W. Debela, ‘Local governance in Switzerland: Adequate Municipal Autonomy Cuminter-
governmental Cooperation?’,Cogent Social Sciences 6 no. 1 (2020); 1763889. DOI: 10.1080/
23311886.2020.1763889.
65. This is what Zürich, among many other local governments, has been advocating for, for
years. The event at the Zürich City Hall in September 2021 (in which I conducted
THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS 1183

participant observation) on giving non-national Zurchers the right to vote in local elections
was very enthusiastic, passionate and heated, with discussions leading to theoretical argu-
ments about abolishing the nation-state.
66. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate’, 432.
67. Ibid., 429.
68. E.g. crisis: Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate’, 428–9; individual agency:
T. Y. Sabchev, S. Miellet, E. Durmuş,‘Human Rights Localisation and Individual Agency:
From “Hobby of the Few”to the Few Behind the Hobby’,inMyth or Lived Reality, eds.
Boost C., Broderick A., Coomans F., Moerland R. (The Hague: T.M.C. Asser Press, 2020).
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6265-447-1_6;socialisation, political will, funding and
cooperation: Durmuş,‘How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take Root’, 135–47.
69. Aleinikoff,‘Local Citizenship Needs Local Sovereignty’.
70. Ibid.
71. Orgad, ‘A Political Promise or a Hollow Hope?’, 78.
72. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives?’.
73. Durmuş, E. (2020), ‘A typology of local governments’engagement with human rights: Legal
pluralist contributions to international law and human rights’Netherlands Quarterly of
Human Rights, 38(1): 30–54. doi:10.1177/0924051920903241; Durmuş,‘How Human
Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take Root’.
74. Oomen et al., ‘Strategies of Divergence.
75. Ibid.
76. M. Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (Russell
Sage Foundation, 1980).
77. Ibid.
78. Oomen et al., ‘Strategies of Divergence, 2, citing E. Fontanari and M. Ambrosini, ‘Into the
Interstices: Everyday Practices of Refugees and Their Supporters in Europe’s Migration
“Crisis”’,Sociology 52, no. 3 (2018): 587–603.
79. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives?’, 432.
80. Durmuş,‘How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take Root’.
81. Oomen et al., ‘Accelerating Cities, Constitutional Brakes?’.
82. A. Fels, ‘The Political Economy of Regulation’UNSWLJ 5 (1982): 29; B. Lange, F. Haines
and D. Campbell, eds. ‘Regulatory spaces and interactions’Special Issue, Social and Legal
Studies 12, no. 4 (2003): 411–545; C. Scott, ‘Analysing Regulatory Space: Fragmented
Resources and Institutional Design’,Public Law (2001): 283–305. See also: Science Direct,
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theory (accessed 15 February 2024).
83. O. James, ‘Regulation Inside Government: Public Interest Justifications And Regulatory
Failures’,Public Administration 78, no. 2 (2000): 327–43. See also for an extensive overview:
B. Morgan and K. Yeung, An Introduction to Law and Regulation: Text and Materials of Law
in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
84. Brittanica, s.v. ‘Regulation Theory’, https://www.britannica.com/topic/governance/Regu-
lation-theory (Accessed 15 February 2024).
85. Law No. 6458, ‘Law on Foreigners and International Protection’(‘YUKK’), entered into
force 11 April 2013, Unofficial English translation by the Department of Communication
for Foreigners, Directorate General of Migration Management, Ministry of Interior
Affairs, Turkey. https://yimer.gov.tr/EN/Legis/215f1c4c-5384-47f9-9ac2-dc2575b4d48f;
Temporary Protection Regulation, adopted by Council of Ministers Decision No: 2014/
6883, 22/10/2014 No: 29153, pursuant to Law No 6458.
86. Law No. 6458, ‘Law on Foreigners and International Protection’, Article 7(3): ‘Persons ben-
efiting from temporary protection shall not be deemed as having been directly acquired one
of the international protection statuses as defined in the Law’.
87. Ibid., Art. 61.
88. J. Hathaway and M. Foster, The Law of Refugee Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511998300.
1184 E. DURMUŞ

89. M. M. Erdoğan (2017) ‘Urban Refugees –From “Detachment”to “Harmonisation”: Syrian
Refugees and Process Management of Municipalities: The Case of Istanbul’, February 2017,
Report conducted and published in Collaboration with the Migration Policy Centre of
Marmara Municipalities Union, 40.
90. Law No. 6458, ‘Law on Foreigners and International Protection’, Article 96.
91. Law No 5393, ‘Law of Municipalities’, Art. 13(1), entered into force through publication in
the Official Gazette: 13/7/2005 under Number 25874.
92. Ibid., Art.14.
93. Erdoğan, ‘Urban Refugees –From “Detachment”to “Harmonisation”’.
94. Anonymous Interview #12 (Canton Geneva), July 2019.
95. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives?’, 427.
96. M. M. Mexi, P. Moreno Russi and E. F. Guzman, ‘“Fortress”Switzerland? Challenges to
Integrating Migrants, Refugees and Asylum-Seekers’,inMigrants, Refugees and Asylum
Seekers’Integration in European Labour Markets, eds. Federico V., Baglioni S., IMISCOE
Research Series (Cham: Springer, 2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67284-3_11.
97. Anonymous Interview #10 (Civil Society –Geneva), July 2019. Interview Martenot (Solidar-
ite Tattes –Geneva), July 2019.
98. Anonymous Interview #10 (Civil Society –Geneva), July 2019; M. Flubacher, ‘On ‘Promot-
ing and Demanding’Integration: A Discursive Case Study of Immigrant Language Policy in
Basel’,inDiscursive Approaches to Language Policy, eds. Barakos, E., Unger J.W. (2016). DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-53134-6_10.
99. AIDA (Asylum Information Database), Country Report: Switzerland (updated 2020), Avail-
able, European Council of Refugees and Exiles, at: https://asylumineurope.org/wp-content/
uploads/2021/05/AIDA-CH_2020update.pdf (last accessed 13 January 2022).
100. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives?’, 427.
101. Ibid.: ‘At the lowest level especially, Swiss municipalities have faced a number of challenges, such
as the rising complexity and variety of tasks at a time when their capacity for action was falling’.
102. Integrationsagenda Schweiz, Federal Ministry for Migration, all documents and forms avail-
able at: https://www.sem.admin.ch/sem/de/home/integration-einbuergerung/integrations
foerderung/kantonale-programme/integrationsagenda.html
103. Anonymous Interview #10 (Civil Society –Geneva), July 2019.
104. Interview Yvonne Meier (Municipality Illnau-Effretikon) September 2021; Interview Anon-
ymous #7 (Municipality of Zürich), March 2021; Interview Renata Gäumann (Canton
Basel), June 2021; Interview Christina Wandeler (Municipality Zürich), July 2021; Interview
Thomas Schmutz #1 (former AOZ –Zürich), July 2021; Interviews Anlaufstelle für Sans-
Papiers Basel, September 2021.
105. See also, on how local autonomy is generally considered high in Switzerland, Keuffner and
Horber-Papazian, ‘The Bottom-Up Approach’.
106. Erdoğan, ‘Urban Refugees –From “Detachment”to “Harmonisation”’; see also Section 5(b).
107. Anonymous Interview #1 (Civil society –Istanbul), December 2018; Interview Zeytinburnu
Municipality AKDEM (Istanbul), December 2018; Interview Turkish Union of Municipali-
ties, External Relations Department, January 2019; Anonymous Interview #3 (International
Civil Society –Istanbul), December 2018.
108. Interview Yvonne Meier (Municipality Illnau-Effretikon), September 2021; Interview
Renata Gäumann (Canton Basel), June 2021; Interview Anonymous #7 (Municipality of
Zürich), March 2021.
109. Keuffner and Horber-Papazian, ‘The Bottom-Up Approach’.
110. Ibid., 311.
111. Interview Sultanbeyli Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
112. Interview International Organisation for Migration, Turkey (Ankara), January 2019.
113. Interview Anonymous #3 (International Civil Society), December 2018.
114. See note 112 above; Interview Anonymous #3 (International Civil Society), December 2018.
115. Interview International Organisation for Migration, Turkey (Ankara), January 2019.
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116. Interview Bea Schwager (Züri City Card Initiative –Zürich), September 2019; Participant
Observation Urban Citizenship Workshop, La Chaux-de-Fonds, September 2021.
117. Participant Observation Urban Citizenship Workshop, La Chaux-de-Fonds, September
2021.
118. Orgad, ‘Cities of Exclusion’, 78.
119. See Section 6(a).
120. Sabchev, T. Y. (2021), Local Authorities, Human rights, and the Reception and Integration of
Forced Migrants in Greece and Italy, (Utrecht: Intersentia); Durmuş,‘How Human Rights
Cross-Pollinate and Take Root’.
121. Keuffner, ‘Does Local Autonomy Facilitate Local Government Reform Initiatives?’, 429.
122. Anonymous Interview #1, (Civil Society –Istanbul), December 2018 (decisions are ‘between
the two lips of the Mayor”); Anonymous Interview #3 (International Civil Society –Istan-
bul), December 2018; Interview Turkish Union of Municipalities (Ankara), January 2019;
Interview Marmara Municipalities’Union (Istanbul), December 2018; Interview Inter-
national Organisation for Migration, Turkey (Ankara), January 2019.
123. Durmuş,‘How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take Root’.
124. Oomen et al., ‘Strategies of Divergence’.
125. Ibid., 7–8.
126. Ibid.
127. Interview Bağcılar Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018; Participant Observation in the
International Migration and Integration Symposium, Istanbul, March 2018; Interview Zey-
tinburnu Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
128. Interview Anonymous #1 and Anonymous #2 (Civil Society –Istanbul), December 2018;
Interview Çankaya Municipality (Ankara), January 2019; Interview Union of Turkish Muni-
cipalities (Ankara), January 2019.
129. See, for an in-depth overview, Durmuş,‘How Human Rights Cross-Pollinate and Take
Root’.
130. Ibid.
131. Anonymous Interview #1, (Civil Society –Istanbul), December 2018.
132. Interview Anonymous #7 (Municipality of Zurich); Interview Thomas Schmutz #1 and #2
(former AOZ, Zurich), June 2021 and September 2021; Interview Bea Schwager (Zueri
City Card Initiative), September 2021; Participant Observation in the Urban Citizenship
Workshop, La Chaux-de-Fonds, September 2021.
133. Interview Anonymous #7 (Municipality of Zurich), March 2021; Interview Thomas
Schmutz #1 and #2 (former AOZ, Zurich), June 2021 and September 2021; Participant
Observation in the Urban Citizenship Workshop, La Chaux-de-Fonds, September 2021.
134. Interview Anonymous #7 (Municipality of Zurich), March 2021; Interview Thomas
Schmutz #1 and #2 (former AOZ, Zurich), June 2021 and September 2021; Interview Bea
Schwager (Zueri City Card Initiative), September 2021; Participant Observation in the
Urban Citizenship Workshop, La Chaux-de-Fonds, September 2021.
135. Ibid.
136. Ibid.
137. ‘Fragen zur Züri City-Card’, 24.02.2021, Answers to the questions 1–3 posed on the Züri
City Card on 16.12.2020, by Bundesraetin Fiala Doris of the liberal party (FDP). https://
www.parlament.ch/de/ratsbetrieb/suche-curia-vista/geschaeft?AffairId=20204528. Trans-
lation mine. Original: ‘Die "City Card" ist eine Initiative der Stadt Zürich, die sich nicht
auf Bundesrecht stützt. (…) Solche Ausweise wären somit rechtlich nicht verbindlich,
und es könnte daraus kein rechtmässiger Aufenthalt abgeleitet werden. Die Einführung
einer solchen Karte als Identitätsausweis würde daher gegen Bundesrecht verstossen’.
138. Anonymous Interview #10 (Civil Society –Geneva), July 2019.
139. Ibid.
140. Interview Thomas Schmutz #1 (former AOZ –Zürich), July 2021; Interview Martenot (Soli-
darite Tattes Geneva), July 2019.
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141. Cities of Refuge, Interview Pim Fischer (human rights lawyer active in the Netherlands),
March 2018.
142. Interview Zeytinburnu Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
143. Interview Keçiören Municipality (Ankara), January 2019; Interview International Organisa-
tion for Migration (Ankara), January 2019.
144. Interview Sultanbeyli Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
145. Interview Şişli Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
146. Interview IOM (Ankara), January 2019; Interview Keçiören Municipality (Ankara), January
2019.
147. Interview Bernard (Municipality Geneva), July 2019; Anonymous Interview #7 (Municipal-
ity of Zürich), March 2021; Interview Thomas Schmutz #1 (former AOZ Zürich), July 2021;
Interview Sarah Schilliger (Wir sind alle Bern –Bern), November 2020; Interview Christina
Wandeler (Municipality of Zürich), July 2021.
148. Anonymous Interview #10 (Civil Society –Geneva), July 2019.
149. Anonymous Interview #12 (Canton of Geneva), Interview Gäumann (Canton Basel-Stadt),
June 2021.
150. See note 148 above.
151. Interview Bağcılar Municipality (Istanbul), December 2018.
152. Interview and Focus Group Ankara Metropolitan Municipality, January 2019.
153. Press Release of the City of Zürich, Department of Social Affairs, ‘Stadt Zürich fordert
umgehend eine nationale Konferenz zur Direktaufnahme Geflüchteter’, 10 September
2020, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/sd/de/index/ueber_das_departement/medien/medien
mitteilungen_aktuell/2020/september/200910a.html (last accessed 20.02.2022).
154. Bart Oertli, ‘Schweizer Städte wollen mehr afghanische Flüchtlinge aufnehmen’, SRF, 19
August 2021, https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/staedte-kritisieren-bund-schweizer-staedte-
wollen-mehr-afghanische-fluechtlinge-aufnehmen (last accessed 20.02.2022); Interview
Anonymous #7 (Municipality Zürich), March 2021; Interview Christina Wandeler (Muni-
cipality Zürich), July 2021.
155. Press Release Zürich, ‘Stadt Zürich fordert umgehend eine nationale’.
156. Oertli, ‘Schweizer Städte wollen’.
157. Interviews Kontaktstelle für Sans Papiers Basel, September 2021; Interview Anonymous #13
(Civil Society –Zurich), September 2021.
158. Interview Renata Gäumann (Canton Basel-Stadt), June 2021.
159. Ibid.
160. Interviews Kontaktstelle für Sans Papiers Basel, December 2021; Anonymous Interview #12
(Canton Geneva), July 2019.
161. Ibid.
162. ‘Gesamthafte Prüfung der Problematik der Sans-Papiers - Bericht des Bundesrats in Erfül-
lung des Postulats der Staatspolitischen Kommission des Nationalrats vom 12. April 2018
(18.3381)’, Bern, December 2020, 24.
163. Interview IOM (Ankara), January 2019; Interview Anonymous #1 (International Civil
Society –Istanbul), December 2018; Interview Anonymous #2 and Anonymous #3 (Civil
Society –Istanbul), both December 2018.
164. This was what the Mayor of Bağcılar did in the 2018 International Migration and Integration
Symposium co-organised by Bağcılar Municipality.
165. Keuffner and Horber-Papazian, ‘The Bottom-Up Approach’.
166. Oomen et al.‘Accelerating Cities, Constitutional Brakes?; Oomen et al., ‘Strategies of
Divergence’.
Funding
This research was conducted as part of the Cities of Refuge project under Utrecht University
(Netherlands) funded by the Netherlands Scientific Organisation (NWO). My time revising this
piece for publication was funded by Antwerp University in my new position.
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Notes on contributor
Elif Durmuşis a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Faculty of Law. iBOF project
‘Future-Proofing Human Rights: Developing Thicker Accountability’(Antigoon ID: 42367), Belgium.
Appendices
Appendix 1. Swiss integration agenda –cantonal integration plan roster, p. 1
Appendix 2. Cantonal integration plan budget roster, divided by KIP (cantonal
integration plan) goals for (see tabs in the excel file below) individual issues:
Initial information and integration needs assessment, counselling, anti-
discrimination, language and education, labour market adequacy, translation,
living together (inclusion)
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