Right to the city

The right to the city is a claim that was first collected in 1968 by the French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his eponymous book Le Droit à la ville.

Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City

In his book Le Droit à la ville Lefebvre designed the Right to the City as a right to a transformed, renewed urban life. He was responding to the social problems that have arisen due to the rapid urbanization of the post-war period, particularly through the mass housing. Lefebvre complained about the numerous quality degradation that accompanied the urbanization process by the former city is increasingly subject as a site of creative production, as oeuvre exchange value and the industrial logic of exploitation and for its residents finally in the forced opening " in boxes, cages or leave ' include machines for living ". At the same time he identified in the urbanization also an enormous positive potential, which could lead in the context of an urban revolution to the emergence of an emancipated urban society. Thus, the right to the city is a whole of society entitled to landscaped in the process of urbanization urban qualities that are for Lefebvre in the encounter, in exchange, in the fixed and in a collectively designed and used urban space.

The urban researcher Dirk Gebhardt and Andrej Holm take this multi-faceted idea together as a "right to centrality, as the access to the places of social wealth, the city's infrastructure and knowledge; and the right to difference, which stands for a city as a place of meeting, of self- knowing and acknowledging and addressing [ ... ] It is not limited to the specific use of urban spaces, but also includes access to the political and strategic debates on the future development paths. The right to the city is based on the utopian promises of the Municipal and reclaims a right to the creative excesses of the urban ".

Many of the fragmentary ideas that Lefebvre in Le droit à la ville presented first, he has developed in his subsequent publications on the topic of city and space, such as in Du rural à l' urbain (1970 ), La révolution urbaine (1970 ), La marxiste pensée à la ville (1972 ), Espace et politique (1972) and La production de l' espace (1974).

Current law on urban concepts

Since the turn of the millennium Lefebvre demand from very different sides took up increasingly. In many cities were formed under the motto right to the city social protest movements, such as in Istanbul, New Orleans, Madrid or Hamburg. In the U.S., since 2007, the Right to the City Alliance ( RTTC ) is active, a nationwide association, opposes Gentrifizierungprozessen. In German-speaking hamburgische the network right to the city ( RaS ) scored the biggest mobilizations and thus obtained a model for other cities. In addition, the right to the city has also become the subject of academic conferences and debates. In particular, representatives of critical urban studies such as David Harvey, Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer took advantage of this Lefebvre approach as the basis for a radical critique of society and system. In response to the urban problems of the global South as the Slumbildung with the corresponding precarious housing, living and legal relationships and non -governmental organization Lefebvre's requirement additionally have integrated into their work. For example, the Habitat International Coalition ( HIC), a coalition of numerous anchored in the social movements NGOs has developed a World Charter for the Right to the City. Such efforts were eventually supported by the UN agencies UN habiat and UNESCO, which in turn posit a right to the city.

These multiple references to the right to the city, however, differ significantly and were also criticized for their partly considerable distance to Lefebvre's intention again and again. So complained about the Brazilian Professor of Human Geography Marcelo Lopes de Souza, that the popularity of the law has led to the city to a trivialisation and corruption of the original approach.