The Right to the City

The lovely Polis blog has an interesting article on the concept of ‘The Right to the City,’ which we had not heard of before now! There are some interesting links in the article to follow up on, including “The European Charter for Human Rights in the City.”

“This concept was coined by Henri Lefebvre, a radical French Marxist sociologist and philosopher, in 1968 and is about the rights of all urban dwellers, regardless of citizenship, ethnicity, ability, gender and so forth, to participate in shaping the city. It is about the rights of the excluded and marginalised to be part of the production of the city, for their needs and aspirations, rather than exclusively those of capital as occurs in most urban development, to be met in the process. The right to the city thus fundamentally challenges existing power relations and the deep roots of the capitalist system that drive urban development and the production of urban space, including social, political and economic relations.”

http://www.thepolisblog.org/2009/11/right-to-city-reflections-on-theory-and.html