Right to the City

Definition

The right to the city is Henri Lefebvre's demand that the city be produced by and for its inhabitants, not by capital and the state — a rallying cry of urban justice movements. It is not merely the right to access existing urban resources but the right to produce urban space itself: a collective claim on the city as oeuvre rather than as commodity. In this wiki, Goudsmit extends the concept to the question of cultural infrastructure: the absence of public cultural life in new towns is itself a denial of the right to the city, since public cultural buildings, embedded in social life, are essential to instituting an "urban imaginary" and collective identity. Kaika, via Goudsmit, links the right to the city to the distinction between public icons (embedded in social and cultural urban life, enhancing the urban commons) and "autistic" icons (self-absorbed, detached from public space). The right to the city thus operates as both a critical diagnostic (who loses when the city is produced by/for capital?) and a normative counter-concept to the neoliberal metropolis.

Key Thinkers

• Henri Lefebvre — originated the concept; the city as oeuvre vs. commodity; the right to urban life.
• Inge Goudsmit — extends the concept to the unequal production of iconic cultural architecture in Hong Kong's new towns.
• Maria Kaika — the "truly public icon" vs. "autistic architecture" distinction that specifies what the right to the city demands of architecture.

Related Concepts

• The Commons — the social form of urban life the right to the city claims; the collective resource against privatization.
• Gentrification — the concrete violation of the right to the city: displacement, enclosure, the conversion of the city into a financial asset.
• Neoliberal Metropolis — the urban condition the right to the city opposes.
• Everyday Life — the register in which the right to the city is exercised or denied.
• Right to Design — the interior volume's counterpart: access to well-designed places as a UDHR-grounded human right (Teston).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Who Wins and Who Loses in the Production of Cultural Iconic Architecture?
• Critique of Everyday Life
• Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment
• The Urban Process under Capitalism
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the interior-scale counterpart: the right to design — "each person should be able to access well-designed places and experiences. Interiors shape lives in the most fundamental and personal way"; grounded in the same post-WWII rights tradition (UDHR Art. 25(1), 27(1)) — see right-to-design.
• Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the right's micro-political form, asked at the boundary: Broadgate's unsealed gates provoke each visitor to ask "'Should I be here, and now? Do I have the right of passage?'" — the right of the city reduced to a self-administered passage-check ("everyone who enters is either a worker, visitor or trespasser"); while the Holy Trinity screen divides the city into those who own and those who are "divorced from" it — the homeless' appropriated "illegal real estate" the counter-claim to a city produced against its users. See privatised-public-space, thick-edge.
• Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the suburban uptake: "In building on the seminal work on 'the right to the suburb' by Carpio et al. (2011), Schafran et al. (2013, p. 2835) argue that: Not only do proper social movements exist in exurbia, but that they function in a hyper multiscalar fashion…" (p. 590; see scalar-promiscuity) — the right's tradition extended to the metropolitan periphery through immigrant activism, where the claim is not to enter the city but to produce the periphery. The register also holds the demand's democratic form: the densification of the larger metropolitan region "must be a democratic and differentiated affair" (p. 589) — "It is time to change our view of the suburbs without telling the suburbanites how to change" (p. 589). See everyday-suburbanism, scalar-promiscuity.
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the spatial-justice extension: the right to the city given "new life" in the 1990s globalization debates (p. 409); Raymond Rocco's "associational rights claims" and "networks of civic engagement" grounded in "situated practices" attuned to the globalized city-region's "spaces of difference" — "inherently spatial claims, localized demands for increased rights to the city and explicit calls for greater spatial justice and regional democracy" (p. 232); Engin Isin's Foucauldian genealogy of citizenship and the rights to regional city-space (pp. 231–232, 409); the BRU's civil-rights-to-transit-geography case "opening traditional notions of civil rights to a more specifically spatial politics revolving around new visions of democratic citizenship and the rights to the city, the rights – and responsibilities – of all urban dwellers to participate effectively in the social production of their lived cityspaces" (pp. 257–258); and the voting-rights proposals for non-citizen residents (p. 410).

Open Questions

• Is the right to the city a concrete political demand or a utopian horizon — and if the latter, does it risk becoming what Bismarck calls the "public rhetorical form of the project" that aestheticizes scale-destroying development?
• How does the right to the city interact with the right to housing — does Lefebvre's concept subsume housing rights, or are they distinct struggles?