Right to the City

The concept of the right to the city is most closely associated with Henri Lefebvre, the Marxist philosopher of space and everyday life, in his classic polemic Le Droit à la ville (1968/The Right to the City). The right to the city, for Lefebvre, was, first, an abstract claim—what he called the right to the oeuvre, or work, that is, the right to belong to, and to determine the fate of, that urban world that urban dwellers had created: the right not to be alienated from the spaces of everyday life. Second, it was a concrete claim to social, economic, and political goods: housing, culture, work that develops workers rather than destroys them, the rights of the elderly and children, and especially, the rights of all people to a space in the city.

As Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas note in their 1996 review of Lefebvre's urban writings, the right to the city develops in both Lefebvre's work and in the urban uprisings of 1968 as the highest form of rights. It was defined by Lefebvre in 2003 as the summation of other crucial rights: liberty, indi-vidualization in socialization, environs (habitat), and [Page 668]way of living (habiter). For Lefebvre, therefore, “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand”: a cry for those rights of man that are—or ought to be— inalienable, and demand for those concrete rights that might make human rights in the city obtainable, not as a once-and-for-all good, but as an oeuvre (work, but especially a participatory project). The city as oeuvre, however, has as its end la Fête, a “celebration which consumes unproductively, without other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enormous riches in money and object.”