Incidental citizens: Understanding the limits of (post)pandemic urban citizenship of homeless EU migrants in Copenhagen

This talk takes as its starting point a divergence between the ongoing extension of urban citizenship of the homeless in Denmark and the post-pandemic shrinking of the extension of citizenship, however minimal and partial, that homeless EU migrants experienced during the pandemic. It suggest that in order to understand that divergence it is necessary to understand the nature and the limitations of the pandemic inclusion of homeless EU migrants. Empirically this presentation draws on interviews with homeless migrant service providers and other key municipal actors who brokered the pandemic extension, and which are conceptually approached here as key infrastructure of these migrants' citizenship-making. The analysis diagnoses three main limits: limits of the framing of need for a pandemic extension, limits in the perceived and internalized nature of urban agency and limits accruing through multi-scalar nature of European citizenship. While the first relates most immediately to the time of the pandemic, the other two highlight embeddedness of the pandemic extension within the longer established and internalized structural limits of urban citizenship of homeless EU migrants, rather than the transformation thereof. This talk contributes to further qualifications of the thesis of urban pragmatism through an analysis that pays attention especially to the inter-scalar nature of migration governance and citizenship alike.