CityReads│Golden Jubilee of Lefebvre’s Right to the City

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Who is the city for? A Verso report on the Golden Jubilee of Lefebvre’s Right to the City

To commensurate the Golden Jubilee of Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City, Verso books put together a special report to debate the most urgent question of our times: who is the city for?

Verso Books. 2017. The Right to the City: A Verso Report.

Source: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2674-the-right-to-the-city

In 1968, the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre wrote “Le Droit a la Ville” (“The Right to the City”), which has become one of the most essential texts in radical geography and urban studies. It transformed the way we think about urban life and the right to make and remake our cities, and ourselves. This year marks the Golden Jubilee of Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City, his “cry and demand” for a more participatory and democratic city life, is a cause both to celebrate and commiserate. Fifty years on, the question of who is the city is for, and why, is more urgent than ever.

In this special Verso report, some of the most important voices in the current debate on the right to city are gathered to debate what Lefebvre originally intended and what it might mean today within the neoliberal urban world. How these ideas help us to understand the contemporary struggle in housing; how to protest gentrification; the privatization of public spaces; and the demand for places of self-expression, and the security of home. The collection also explores how these ideas can be used in other fields—such as digital space and the Internet of Things.

Contributors include David Adler, Neil Brenner, Bradley Garrett, Andrea Gibbons, Huw Lemmey, David Madden & Peter Marcuse, Andy Merrifield, Anna Minton, Don Mitchell, Rebecca Omonira-Oyekanmi, Nina Power, Dubravka Sekulić, Joe Shaw & Mark Graham, and Alex Vasudevan. The ebook of The Right to the City: A Verso Report can be free downloaded from the verso website.

About Lefebvre

Forever the great democrat, Lefebvre, born in 1901, drank wine with Surrealist poets in the 1930s, fought with the Resistance movement in the 1940s, drove a cab in Paris in the 1950s. He taught sociology and philosophy at various French universities in the 1960s, where he befriended Guy Debord and the Situationists. He was one of the intellectual godfathers of the ‘1968’ generation. Author of sixty-odd books, Lefebvre introduced a whole body of Hegelian Marxism into France, and wrote prolifically about urbanism, everyday life, literature and space. In 1966, he got his first steady academic job at the age of sixty-five! By 1973 he’d “retired,” only to embark on a world tour, writing and speaking, trying to understand an urbanization of the future in Asia and Latin America, and in Los Angeles, a city that both fascinated and appalled him. Lefebvre passed away in 1991.

Fifty years on: the right to the city

Lefebvre announced the right to the city in 1967, at the centenary of Marx’s Capital. With a self-avowedly “cavalier intention”, he viewed the right to the city as an expression of people trying to shape their own destinies. Its presence brings cities to life; its absence usually denotes a city’s death.

Lefebvre was a man of the margins. His right to the city is an ideal conceived from the periphery. It aims to empower outsiders to get inside. The right to the city might seem a fuzzy sort of human right, but it is very concrete. It means the right to live out the city as one’s own, to live for the city, to be happy there. The right to affordable housing, a decent school for the kids, accessible services, reliable public transport. The right to have your urban horizon as wide or as narrow as you want. This might mean an allegiance to the neighborhood, to your street and building, but also to what lies beyond.

To participate doesn’t necessarily mean to be engaged in politics every evening, knocking on doors and going to meetings; it can equally mean a sense of belonging to the urban realm, having a say in its well-being. It means that you feel some sense of collective, shared purpose, that you’re not alienated from the city’s affairs

In the 1960s, Lefebvre linked the right to the city with a “right to centrality.” Back then, he meant a geographical right to occupy the center of the city, a city that was overpriced for ordinary dwellers, becoming gentrified and turned into a tourist spectacle (as in Paris).

Today, if we were to reframe creatively the “right to centrality,” we would see it less as a geographical right than as an existential and political right. the future for the bulk of the world’s urban populations lies beyond notions of the center. The right to the city is the right to stay put, to reside where you are, to afford to reside where you are, to be able to make it your own.

As his commemoration of Marx’s Capital implies, Lefebvre was warning of the closing of the circle of a particular form of post-war capitalism, one that defines itself less through a model of industrial or agricultural production and more through an actual production of space.

This system produces planetary geography as a commodity, as a pure financial asset, using and abusing people and places as strategies to accumulate capital. The process embroils everybody in its mechanics. Urban society has been reduced to the progressive production of evermore frackable spatial units.

Lefebvre warned the menace of “the planetarization of the urban” (“la planétarisation de l’urbain”). He meant the urban becoming a vortex, sucking in everything the planet offers: its land and wealth, its capital and power, its culture and people.

This dynamic motion of the urban machine destabilizes everything. An energizing and totalizing force, the process produces what Lefebvre called a “residue.” As urban space expands, it relentlessly pushes itself out, into the rural hinterland, while also expelling people who are no longer convenient or useful. Every big system, Lefebvre observed, leaves a residue that is chewed up and spat out. Every whole leaves a remainder.

Urbanization was, and still is, a “revolutionary” process. Lefebvre suggests that the political imperative here is to try to formulate a “revolutionary conception of citizenship.” Indeed, he says this is really what he meant by “the right to the city” all along. And, this is the working hypothesis he’s bequeathed us fifty-years down the line. The right to the city is now about those who have been expelled—the residues—reclaiming, or claiming for the first time, their right to a collective urban life, to an urban society they’re actively making yet are hitherto disenfranchised from.

When Lefebvre published La Droit a la Ville in 1967 most of the West was in the throes of transition from an industrial to post industrial economy and industrial production was still of paramount importance. Today, in the post-industrial West the new economy of financial services industries has merged in unholy alliance with a property economy based on speculation and debt and the canvas for this real estate casino economy is urban space. In this context this is an idea whose time has come, with the Right to the City standing for democratic citizenship against the steamroller of private property in the city. As such it is arguably even more important than when Lefebvre coined it.

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