ABSTRACT
Geographer David Harvey links the idea of the right to the city to Marxist theory and argues that the excluded protesters should be striving for collective right to shape everything about the city. He argues that a fundamental feature of capitalism is the recurrence of periodic financial crises. He also argues that urbanization has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses at every geographical scale. The economies experience crises of creative destruction that wipe out value and create a great deal of pain, mostly for poor. This chapter explores one kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. The rights to the city are more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change individually by changing the city more after people heart's desire. The right to the city means the right to command the whole urban process that was increasingly dominating the countryside.
