Reading the Right to the City

Abstract

The “Right to the City” is, for better or worse, a catchy phrase, and has been used with quite a diversity of often contradictory meanings. The article describes Lefebvre's own reading, a strategic reading, a discontented reading, a spatial reading, a collaborationist reading, and a subversive reading. It concludes with the suggestion of an alternate reading, a sectoral reading, consistent with the experience of the Occupy movement today. One should be careful which reading one uses.

Key words:

• Right To The City
• 1968
• housing
• inclusion
• Just City
• Lefebvre

Notes

1 Marcuse (1972, 2005). While technology plays somewhat the role with Herbert Marcuse that urbanization plays with Henri Lefebvre, their fundamental analyses are largely similar.

2 See http://www.righttothecity.org/index.php/about/member-organizations

3 See https://www.facebook.com/pages/Right-To-The-City-Alliance/211649047656?id=211649047656&sk=info

Additional information

Peter Marcuse is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia.