The Right to the City
RTC Coalition
Sept. 7, 2014
Henri Lefebvre
• The Right to the City (1967)
– Context: social crisis in France
• Material reorganization of the city, consumerism, boredom
– “One only has to open one’s eyes to understand the daily life of
the one who runs from his dwelling to the station, near or far
away, to the packed underground train, the office or the factory,
to return the same way in the evening and come home to
recuperate enough to start again the next day. The picture of
this generalized misery would not go without a picture of
‘satisfactions’ which hides it and becomes the means to elude it
and break free from it.”
– People need play, sexuality, physical activities, creative activities,
art and knowledge “which can more or less overcome the
fragmentary division of tasks.”
– Proposal to politicize urban reform and shift ideas in urban
planning
http://bottomupurbanism.wikispaces.com/file/
view/lefebvre-The+right+to+the+city.pdf
Outcomes of 60s (and 70s) Urban
Crises?
• Neoliberalism
– “the mobilization and extension of state power in the contradictory extension and
reproduction of market(-like) rule” (Tickle and Peck, 2003)
– Capitalism reorganized itself with the help of technology to double-down on its
structuring premises: eat away (or sell off) public institutions, destroy institutions that
served as hot beds for radicalism, (i.e. privatizing universities, student debt),
destroying employment security and protections, and privatizing social relations.
– The production of a highly competitive and individualistic subjectivity
• Our crises/context
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Debt
Low wages
No social safety net
A society of rents
No democracy beyond the purely formal
Environmental decline
Overwhelming anxiety and moral conflictedness
The “precariat” replaces the traditional proletariat
• Expression through Occupy and associated movements
– More grin without a cat?
David Harvey
• “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.”
• The right to the city is an empty signifier
– Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning
– Politics and struggle!
David Harvey
• Harvey attributes the return of the idea of a right to the city to
developments in Brazil (not to a revival of Lefebvre)
– Constitutional guarantees that created a new legal-urban order to
provide land access and equity in large urban cities (2001)
• Social function of urban land is put before commercial value: “the
prioritization of use value over exchange value” (however, see recent World
Cup and Olympic developments)
• Ensure democratic city management: “a path to plan, produce, operate and
govern cities subject to social control and participation.”
– Participatory Budgeting (i.e. Belo Horizonte & Porto Alegre)
• Citizens are incorporated into public processes where they decide how to
allocate public funds (up to 100% in some cases)
• Spread throughout the US in a Right to the City Alliance
– Housing, houselessness, LGBTQ issues, etc.
– “the coalition sought a clearer and broader definition of that public
that not only can truly access so-called public space, but can also be
empowered to create new common spaces for socialization and
political action.”
• Also notes recent urban uprisings around the world.
Rights
• Individual
– We are familiar with individual rights and we have established
methods for enforcing them with the help of the state
– Invented as a response to the Divine Right of Kings
– Property rights is the emblematic example; highly emphasized
since the mid-1800s
• Collective
– Basically what we mean by “public”
• Common
– Right to access and use resources
– Includes some traditional content like the 1st Amendment (right
to assemble)
– The right to decide as a democratic body
– The right to a less deterministic politics
Formal Attempt at Common Rights:
People’s Water Trust
Potential Strategy
• Take the claims of liberal democracy seriously and
attempt to fulfill them.
– i.e. expand human rights beyond those with privilege
(housing for all, basic income, access to healthcare)
• Result:
– Exposes the rifts in the way our system fails to
substantively live up to its own vision; identifies the
hypocrites (i.e. Dem Party)
– To the extent reforms succeed, or are even partially
implemented, we’re better off than we were before
– Build strong coalitions in the process to make greater
claims in the future
Question
• How should we define a right to the city in our
locale?