Claiming the right to the city beyond the city: the role of agrarian social movements

ABSTRACT

The Right to the City concept extends beyond cities to include broader urban-rural dialectical processes. This paper proposes that by analyzing claims to transform spaces as struggles to reshape underlying processes, it is possible to identify shared struggles between movements seeking to transform urban and agrarian spaces. The paper examines the role of agrarian social movements, such as La Via Campesina, in reconfiguring urbanization through their claim for food sovereignty. It builds on critical urban and agrarian studies to offer a process-based understanding of the commonalities between seemingly disconnected claims to reshape urban and agrarian spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Right to the city
• space
• social movements
• La Via Campesina

Acknowledgements

I want to express my gratitude to Natalia Correa Sánchez, who worked as a research assistant in the revision process of this paper. Her work on reviewing literature and formatting was instrumental in meeting the revision deadline. I am also thankful to the two anonymous reviewers and the journal editor who provided kind and constructive feedback on this paper. Additionally, I appreciate the helpful comments by Ike Leslie, Nicholas de Genova, Martín Arboleda, and Jane Collins on previous drafts. This paper also benefited from discussions at the 2017 American Sociological Association session on Questioning the City: New Directions in Urban Theory, organized by the Section on Community and Urban Sociology, as well as at the Sociology of Economic Change and Development Brownbag at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Finally, I acknowledge the use of ChatGPT-3.5 for copy-editing this paper. The most common prompts I used were ‘copy-edit this paragraph maintaining its meaning’ and ‘what are 5 synonyms for the word [word] that mean [intended meaning].’

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Serrano

Angela Serrano is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Universidad de los Andes, in Colombia. Her research examines how global economic relations build local socioenvironmental inequalities and how local working communities confront these inequalities. This work builds on ethnographic case studies and participatory approaches. She earned a Ph.D. in Sociology (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2021) an M.A. in Geography (King’s College London, 2015), a B.A. in Political Science, and a B.S. in Economics (Universidad de los Andes, 2012).