The Right against the city

Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City (Sharon M. Meagher, Samantha Noll, and Joseph S. Biehl, eds), 2019

In 1967 Henri Lefebvre described the right to the city as a “cry and demand.” Much of the revival of interest in Lefebvre’s claim focuses on the content of such a right, and prospects for realization. These voices are diverse, and at times (more than gently) sceptical that the right to the city can be anything more than an occasionally useful platitude. All would agree, however, that whatever a right to the city is, it is best understood in terms of how we use urban spaces, not the market value of those spaces. To put the point another way: the right to the city stands opposed to property rights over urban space. So why would Lefebvre himself, a Marxist, invoke the language of rights at all? It is tempting to join the critics in dismissing his “right to the city” as either a strategic or ironic rhetorical gesture. I believe we should resist this temptation: Lefebvre’s account is rooted in a subtle understanding of the historical development of urban life, its intimate yet ambivalent relationship to commerce and industry, and the distinction between our inhabiting urban society, on the one hand, and the rationalist­-commercial logic of urban habitat, on the other. Behind this subtle marriage of history and theory there is a unifying concern that Lefebvre took very early on from Marx: the reciprocal and mutually constitutive relationship between work as an expression of our being in the world, and as such, an inevitable source of alienation.

There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literature, there has been caution as to whether Henri Lefebvre intended a legal and institutionalized meaning for his ‘right to the city’. This paper reviews these debates and from that perspective examines Lefebvre’s positions on law, rights and the right to the city. It locates this within his wider political strategy and in particular the three-pronged strategy he put forward in The Urban Revolution to address the urban question – political foregrounding of the urban, promotion of self-management, and introduction of the right to the city into a transformed contractual system. By contextualizing and reviewing Everyday Life in the Modern World (published immediately before Right to the City), the paper examines Lefebvre’s thinking on rights formation, within ‘opening’, or the process of inducing change. The paper engages with meanings Lefebvre provides for rights in his concept of the right to the city, including his later conception of a contract of citizenship. The paper suggests that engagement with a fluid role of law and rights, in combination with Lefebvre’s other strategies, is important in opening the pathway he charts for the realization of this right, whether through local or global initiatives.

Space and Culture, 2013

As David Harvey and others have argued, this is to say, it has to embrace the diversity of urban yearnings and social movements rather than rely solely on a factory working class as a proletarian revolutionary vanguard. "Our political task, Lefebvre suggests, is to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing urbanizing capital run amok" (Harvey, 2012, p. 9). Purcell suggests the right to the city re-envisions the relationship between capitalism and the structure of liberal-democratic citizenship (Purcell, 2002). Others have noted the profound challenge his notion of a "right to the city" offers to liberal conceptions of human rights and the legal regimes in which they have been codified. Lefebvre proposed that recognition of a right to the city would make more practical the rights of the citizen as an urban dweller (citadin) and user of multiple services. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make known their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the center, a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers, immigrants, the "marginal" and even for the "privileged"). (Lefebvre, 1995, p. 34) This has prompted debates and has also been enshrined in legislation in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico. This accepts a role for social activism and coalitions of the urban poor and disadvantaged. At the same, the local, municipal state takes on a crucial role in mediating between capital and citizens. The risk is that this merely co-opts civil society groups into an existing, globalized system of inequality (Mayer, 2009). As Harvey (2012, p. 138) notes, The right to the contemporary suburb is hardly a viable anti-capitalist slogan. It is for this reason that the right to the city has to be construed not as a right to that which already exists, but as a right to rebuild and re-construe the city as a socialist body politic in a completely different image-one that eradicates poverty and social inequality, and one that heals the wounds of disastrous environmental degradation. As reporting on Quebec's "Maple Spring" of protests in 2012 suggests, complex coalitions of citizens protesting the general conditions of neoliberalism are portrayed as single-issue groups acting in their own narrow self-interest. In this case, university students demanding

2016

The right to the city concept has seen a large number of setbacks, back and forths, interpretations and has been given different meanings. Many different agents have claimed the right to the city, from Nanterre University back in the 60’s to the favelas of Rio, the German self-governed groups or even the UN-Habitat. It is surely of interest to liven up the debate on a concept. Nothing is more pointless than having some principles stated in a book with no practical application of them. Naturally, very often the implementation stage generates disagreements. It is useless for some social movements and inevitable for some others, while some people do not use the term but concretely apply its components. Some, however, use the concept in order to alter the emancipatory potential Henri Lefebvre had thought out. How can we clarify it? How can we understand what the operators claiming the right to the city actually want? And, how do we connect the militants, researchers and local authorities who, without talking about it directly, try to achieve this essential utopia, the right to the city? This publication is a result of all of these questions, thanks to all the author’s contributions.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014

Architectural Theory Review, 2011

transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2015

Ever since the book of Henri Lefebvre “The right to the city” was published in 1968 it served as a great inspiration for several scholars, researchers, academics and activists. Being the point of departure for various urban movements, it contributed to a wave of resistance and destabilization of sovereignty in many parts of the western world during the turbulent decades of the 60s and 70s. While it has become extremely popular or even fashionable, it often appears detached from its original meaning. Various forms of sovereignty used its revolutionary and innovative rhetoric in an attempt to grand radical contexts in their political agendas. Forty five years after the first publication of Lefebvre’s book, the Athenian metropolis, a city in the (epi)center of the crisis turmoil, is governed by a municipal authority party that goes under the name of “Right to the City”. The party adopted much of Lefebvre’s revolutionary rhetoric, such as “the city as oeuvre”, in order to form its political agenda and win the municipal elections of 2010 and 2014. Ever since, a political program is applied based on a rather distorted interpretation of “the right to the city”. In this chapter two approaches of “The right to the city” (‘TRTTC’ from now on) will be confronted. On the one hand the Lefebvrian notion of the 1960s and on the other hand Kaminis’ (the Athens mayoral candidate) appropriation of 2010 and 2014. The first approach is considered as an effort to introduce the Marxian thought in spatial thinking in order to contribute to the emerging emancipatory movements, and the second as a fine example of distortion of contexts in favor of gaining power and promoting neoliberal policies. In this direction, we unfold the political program of Kaminis and examine its applications versus its title and theoretical context. By examining urban policies and tactics that are applied under the cloak of “TRTTC” and form the everyday life in Athens we intend to demonstrate that divisions between form and content can often lead to the complete inversion of primal meanings. By lifting the veil of propaganda it becomes visible that the assimilation of radical contexts on behalf of municipal authority does not lead to emancipatory urban policies but aims to cover up sovereignty. Bringing to surface neo-interpretations of Lefebvre’s analysis, though, does not only enlighten the subversion of the original notions or highlight them as stolen contexts from sovereignty. In fact, not only is it a great opportunity to explore once again and rethink what Lefebvre was teaching and writing during the 60s but also a motive to question, think beyond and challenge it in the contemporary contexts of urban uprisings and revolts. Inspired by the work of several radical scholars like Harvey, de Souza or Pasquinelli we make an argument on the perspectives beyond the Lefebvrian notion and an attempt to approach Athens as an emerging rebel city. During the crisis years various struggles and acts of solidarity have been taking place in the city area, thus several spaces of resistance and commoning have emerged. In this regard, we deal with the transition from demanding the city to occupying the city as a contemporary space of resistance.

This Cahier de la Faculté d’Architecture LaCambre-Horta aims to contribute to the scientific debate on the right to the city, exploring the variety of objects, processes, structures, and relations – both at the conceptual, abstract and theoretical level as well as at the practical, experiential, and material one – that this idea has inspired. The publication offers multiple analysis of the relations between this concept and its application in the urban planning domain, providing a number of examples on how the concept of the right to the city can give practical guidance on urban development. The focus is thus on policies, programmes and projects that aim to intervene in the diverse processes of urbanization and different forms of urban structures and urbanity present in the northern and southern countries, addressing issues of equity, rights, democracy, differences (socio-economic, cultural, etc.) and ecology. The publication aims to explore the socio-spatial relations embedded in alternative approaches – at policy, planning and design level – and emergent practices of urban regeneration, upgrading, development, and management activated by grassroots movements, government agencies or different actors/institutions. This is the reason why we decided to explore the idea of the right to the city within the dialectical confrontation of “social politics” and “urban planning”. The rationale of this Cahier rests on two main principles. First of all, cities are built on the basis of both semiotic and the material contributions, which means that both imaginaries and practices are fundamental in shaping the urban space, its physical form and technology, its socio-economic structure, the social and spatial relations, the subjectivities, the relations with nature, and the daily life reproduction. Second, as the neo-liberal hegemonic culture has emphasized the urban horizon and the city-level in all its physical, social and cultural aspects, the city is the place where oppositional discourses and practices take place. Alternative imaginaries can challenge prevailing worldviews, show the contradictions of the neo-liberal hegemonic project and propose various forms of alternative sets of norms, beliefs, ideals; while alternative practices emerge at various scales of contestation, springing from deprived and often marginalised local groups and places, but also as national projects: there is a need to analyse the variety of imaginaries and practices that in spite of, and because of, the hegemony of the neoliberal culture, are resilient or are emerging (see Boniburini infra).