Right to the city

The present reflexion was greatly inspired by the Right to the City movement initiated by Lefebvre in 1968. In contemporary urban context, it is noticeable that some rights are revoked and neoliberal actions are fragmenting and privatizing furthermore Western cities. Brussels, as the ‘capital’ of Europe, didn’t escaped this widespread paradigm.

[Minorities] Also, it is even more perceptible if we look at minorities. There is indeed less accessibility to the neoliberal market goods and services as wells as public infrastructures if you are part of a minority groups. Neoliberal markets tend to favour certain individuals. Those minorities include women, people of colours, queers, economically weak inhabitants, homeless citizens, disabled individuals, transmigrants, ethnically discriminated persons and people of elder age.

[Inclusive Strategy] For this reason, new ways of imagining a more inclusive and philanthropic city needs to be put in place. We should dream of urban spaces for inhabitant and users, and not for shareholders.

[Lefebvre] All these attacks are prohibiting more and more citizens to fully enjoy the city they inhabit. It is not a novel process, Lefebvre already described those mechanisms in the 70’s.

[Resisting] A revolutionary group and somehow anti-capitalistic thinkers and urbanists asked for more rights for people in the city. They were reunited around the Right to the city movement and represented by Lefebvre, Mitchell, Harvey, Purcell, Dikec and Jacobs. They did not ask for more rights in the judicial sense, but to allow people to fulfil particular basic urban needs. A more socially driven city, less merchandised, accessible for minorities.

[Right to the city] For Lefebvre, it is crucial to reinvent social interrelations to capitalism and spatial structure of the city. The concept of ownership, is for him a real problem. As he posits, the city needs to furthermore belong to its users in a global interest for society. For him, a spatial resistance to confront spatial hegemony is needed. He explains, that the city is not a spatial material but more feeling of urban space as a physical context to practice everydayness (Lefebvre, 1968).

[Heterotopic space] He also posits the notion of heterotopia. It is defined as being the ‘‘delineates liminal social spaces of possibility -where ‘something different’ is possible’’ (Purcell, 2009). For him diversity of space is a crucial urban interactions.

[Appropriation] He also manifests the need for appropriation. It is, he says a way to reinvent generic spaces into new usable spaces. This notion is crucial in modern urban planning.

[Commons] It is possible to read in Lefebvre and Right to the city movement an ideation promoting a common good. A way to create more distributed opportunities to a wider proportions of the population. This idea of common good generated the pre-existing principles of Urban Commons.

“The right to the city is like a cry and a demand, a transformed and renewed right to urban life.”

Lefebvre H., 1968. Le droit à la ville (Paris : Anthopos)