The right to the city

The right to the city implies nothing less than a revolutionary concept of citizenship. This chapter considers one of Henry Lefebvre’s best-known concepts, the right to the city to determine whether it always presumes the right to the centre. As David Harvey has observed, ‘the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city’. The conceptual attractiveness of the right to city risks it becoming just another empty slogan. Its appropriation by governments, or even non-governmental organisations, carries with it permanent threats to neutralise the revolutionary-utopian import of Lefebvre’s phrase. Lefebvre’s preoccupation with the city, and centrality, derives from his identification of traditional cities with pre-modern, pre-capitalist, spatial organisation, which makes them models for a possible future urbanism.