! Henri Lefebvre ¡The right to the city ¡

! Henri Lefebvre ¡The right to the city ¡

Leszek Kolakowski & Henri Lefebvre

The right to the city is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville and that has been reclaimed in the last decades by social movements, thinkers and several progressive local authorities alike as a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space—a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism has had over social interaction and the rise of spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. 

In his first inception of the concept, Lefevbre paid specific emphasis on the effects that capitalism had over “the city”, whereas urban life was downgraded into a commodity, social interaction became increasingly uprooted and urban space and governance were turned into exclusive goods. In opposition to this trend, Lefebvre called to “rescue the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built” and to transform urban space into “a meeting point for building a collective life”. 

Due to the inequalities produced by the rapid increase of world urban population in most regions of the world, the concept of the right to the city has been rescued various decades after the publication of Lefevbre’s book as a call to action by social movements and grassroots organizations. In their appeal for “their right to the city”, local mobilizations around the world usually refer to their struggle for social justice and a dignified access to urban life face to growing urban inequalities (especially in large metropolitan concepts).

The right to the city has had a particular influence in Latin America and Europe, where social movements have particularly appealed to the concept in their actions and promoted local instruments for advancing its concrete understanding in terms of policy-making at the local and even national level.[6] A good proof on how the notion of the right to the city has gained international recognition in the last years could be seen in the United Nations Habitat III process, and how the New Urban Agenda (2016) recognized the concept as the vision of “cities for all”. 

The growing popularity of the concept has nonetheless raised some criticism and concerns on how the original vision of Henri Lefebvre could be reduced to a “citizenship vision”, focused on the mere implementation of social and economic rights in the city leaving aside its transformative nature and the concept of social conflict behind the original concept. Marcelo Lopes de Souza has, for instance, argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "the price of this has often been the trivialization and corruption of Lefebvre's concept" and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.

Much current activism and scholarship have raised concern that the various processes of neoliberal restructuring are threatening democracy. More specifically, researchers in geography and other social sciences have stressed that political and economic restructuring in cities is negatively affecting the enfranchisement of urban residents. 

Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand...[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". 

David Harvey described it as follows:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. 

It has been suggested that the phrase has taken on a variety of meanings[9] and Marcelo Lopes de Souza has argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "[t]he price of this has often been the trivialization and corruption of Lefebvre's concept" and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.

A number of popular movements, such as the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, the Right to the City Alliance in the United States,  Recht auf Stadt, a network of squatters, tenants and artists in Hamburg, and various movements in Asia and Latin America, have incorporated the idea of the right to the city into their struggles.

In Brazil, the 2001 City Statute wrote the Right to the City into federal law. 

More recently, scholars have proposed a 'Digital Right to the City', which involves thinking about the city as not just bricks and mortar, but also digital code and information. 

Much recent research and writing have explored progressive responses to this perceived disenfranchisement in cities. One popular trend has been a fascination with the idea of the ‘right to the city’ as a way to respond to neoliberal urbanism and better empower urban dwellers. I argue that the right to the city holds promise, but that in the literature the idea remains both theoretically and politically underdeveloped.

 It remains unclear what the right to the city entails or how it might address current problems of disenfranchisement. This paper examines the right to the city in greater depth. It does so by offering a close reading and analysis of the intellectual roots of the idea: the writings of Henri Lefebvre. I suggest that Lefebvre’s right to the city is more radical, more problematic, and more indeterminate than the current literature makes it seem. 

The paper concludes by suggesting that the right to the city does offer a distinct potential for resisting current threats to urban enfranchisement. However, the right to the city is not a panacea. It must be seen not as a completed solution to current problems, but as an opening to a new urban politics, what 

I call an urban politics of the inhabitant.

https://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/geojournal.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_the_city

http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/jua_rtc.pdf

https://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/geojournal.pdf

http://atlasofplaces.com/filter/Essay/The-Right-to-the-City-Henri-Lefebvre

La producción del Espacio
https://monoskop.org/images/7/75/Lefebvre_Henri_The_Production_of_Space.pdf