Incidental citizens: The limits of pandemic urban citizenship of homeless EU migrants in Copenhagen  

During the pandemic, municipal and civil society actors in Copenhagen worked actively to secure access to social resources and strengthen the rights of some of the most marginalized migrants in the city, namely homeless migrants. As we show elsewhere, this mobilization resulted in an extension of their citizenship, albeit in a very limited and fragmented one. In this article we examine the reasons for this limited extension. We draw primarily on interviews with migrant service providers and other municipal actors whom we conceptualize in this research as key infrastructural agents of migrants’ urban citizenship-making. Our analysis stresses three inter-linked factors: the fear- based framing, the perceptions of limited urban agency, and the multi-scalar nature of EU citizenship. We argue that within the broader context, in which the pandemic was seen as a temporary, exceptional situation and where homeless migrants’ issues are consistently marginalized, these factors ensured that municipal actors’ brokering failed to substantially renegotiate the parameters of their citizenship. Through this analysis of the incidental nature of migrants’ pandemic citizenship this article contributes to the scholarship on urban governance of migration by highlighting the necessity to contend with both, the inter-scalar nature of citizenship politics and particularities of distinct migrant populations.