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One of the main findings of the present research is that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state. Many of the testimony collected in our field works contradict the simplistic conception that understands migration as leaving one place and arriving and settling at another and show that things are much more varied and complex.
The local territorial identification presents no contradiction with the claim for citizenship rights and with the exercise of transnational family, social, economic and political practices.The empirical results of this research allow us to confirm that transnational practices and the consequent consolidation of social transnational fields does not necessarily interfere with the feeling of belonging to the places of settlement. Besides, the already introduced concept of positionality enables us to understand how the immigrant population creates meaning, ascribes to values and practices citizenship rights according to gender, social class, time of arrival, legal status, education level and the different migration strategies and trajectories.
Informal encounters and contacts of various kinds with both migrants and locals shape a different urban landscape in which the neighbourhood (re)emerges as a site of inclusion/exclusion, in which practices of participation in city life acquire hight importance. People without formal rights in the places where they live their everyday life can and do take part in a variety of activities and at times find ways of political expression. Here the neighbourhood represents an on-going project of creating, transforming and improving spaces, relationships and activities among multiple communities which inhabit it, a forum of confrontations and mutual adaptations and intercultural interactions which affect migrants but also locals.
