“The right to the city”

The right to the city is a collective struggle to rework the urbanization process itself. This chapter compares urban renewal in Haussmann’s Paris in the 1860s with postwar American suburban sprawl, mass consumption, inter-state highway construction, and with more recent forms of urbanization in China, India, Korea, and in the Gulf States. 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. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. In China millions are being dispossessed of the spaces they have long occupied–three million in Beijing alone. Since they lack private-property rights, the state can simply remove them by fiat, offering a minor cash payment to help them on their way before turning the land over to developers at a large profit.