The landscape from within: Citizenship, locale and the construction of place in Dupont circle

Rather than viewing citizenship merely as a relationship defined by the state, we can use this concept as an analytical category to understand our relationships with other people and with the built environment. Citizenship, like gender, is a performative category in which every person's attempt to approximate the ideal changes the very nature of that ideal. Using interviews, text analysis, participant observation and archival research, I investigate two of the ways that residents of the Dupont East neighborhood of Washington, DC construct local citizenship. These two discursive constructions of citizen activist and citizen consumer entail strikingly different sets of rights, responsibilities, and obligations to people and to the locale. Under this arrangement, rather than being static and emplaced, landscape and "ways of seeing" the local terrain become processes by which people negotiate and contest their relationship and behaviors with other residents, with members of other groups, and with the state.