ABSTRACT
Reproduction in the capitalist city can be tiring for some and unjust for many. The opening quotes highlight the obstacles that a worker (living in a distant suburb, an isolated housing project, or a satellite city) and a homeless person must circumvent on a daily basis to reproduce their labour power and survive in the capitalist city. Both quotes seek to highlight the extent to which the form of the city - its property regime (Blomley 2004) as well as its vastness – shapes our daily social and spatial practices. For Henri Lefebvre (1996: 159), the routine of the worker reveals the ‘untragic misery of the inhabitant’. The homeless, we can add, exhibits the ‘tragic misery of the inhabitant’, for Ron’s ability to satisfy a basic human need was impaired by the systematic closure of public bathrooms across New York City (Duneier 1999). Do we, as critical urban scholars, possess the conceptual framework and moral language to evaluate the above conditions? In this chapter I argue that the language of rights, understood as something to which one has a just claim, can provide us the conceptual framework and moral grounds to denounce unjust spatial practices and transform the social and spatial conditions that shape our (tragic and untragic) urban experiences.
