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The purpose of this paper is to take part in the debate about power relationships in contemporary cities between the agents of urban renewal and the local communities, as mediated by cultural and artistic interventions and projects. Our study proposes a new conceptual frame, focused on the comparison between two notions of heterotopia as theoretical alternatives for the interpretation of cities as social and participatory spaces. The notions we consider may be traced to two key thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, and lay the foundation for alternative analytical paradigms of the contemporary urban condition, in relation to artistic and cultural practices in the public space. We draw upon these two alternative readings of heterotopia to explore the implications of the interaction of artistic practices with the urban space as a contested terrain from the viewpoint of power relationships. In our analysis, we find that Foucault's notion of heterotopia is potentially conducive to top-down planning processes and to gentrification. Lefebvre's notion is instead possibly more suited to participatory practices as strategies of reactivation of the right to the city.

Based on an ethnographic research conducted over three years (2010–2012), this paper suggests new analytical concepts reflecting two types of temporal activism aimed at exercising the ethnic and gendered right to the city: daily activism and anecdotal activism. This analysis is based on a study of the activities of the feminist Mizrahi 1 movement Achoti (Hebrew for my sister) . The findings show that there are more than one way and more than one space to fulfill the feminist and Mizrahi right to the city. It also argues that activism as a means to fulfill the right to the city produces a “third space” that is both temporal and temporary, and can be identified in both types of temporal activism.

The denial of the right to the city for various social groups is well documented in academic discourses. However, these debates lack sufficient attention to intersecting axes of social disadvantage. Furthermore, most of the relevant studies apply definitions of the right to the city that are based on urban inhabitance. In Hungary, and in other Central and Eastern European countries, where urban-rural inequalities are still obvious manifestations of uneven spatial development, we should also concentrate on the right to the city of those who inhabit rural communities. In this study, we address the following research question: how does the right to the city (as a universal human right) apply to rural women who experience multiple social disadvantage? We argue that within the framework of the concept of the right to the city, people's basic needs and the fact that certain social groups cannot exercise their right to fundamental urban resources should not be downplayed. We also argue that the curtailment of the right to the city is not universal among rural dwellers, and this disadvantage does not affect each of these people to the same extent and in the same ways. There is a considerable diversity in how the limitation of the right to urban resources manifests itself and how disadvantaged rural residents experience it (due to e.g. intersecting axes of oppression/identities). Our empirical study is based on interviews conducted with 32 disabled or chronically ill women living in Hungarian rural areas. The focus is on their perceptions of their everyday lives and reflections on their problems regarding the access to urban resources and services. According to the interviews, urban-rural divide and patriarchal and ableist power relations contribute to the violations of disabled women's right to the city.

This article focuses on live-in elder care workers in German-speaking Switzerland, with a focus on the city of Basel. Working with the Lefebvrian concept of le droit a la ville, it critically investigates the extent to which circularly migrating women can negotiate their right to the city when working as private 24-hour carers in Basel. It first discusses how the Swiss migration and labor regimes in this gendered field of work affect their rights, access, belonging, and participation in the city. The article then analyzes two examples of how live-in care workers challenge existing regulations individually and collectively, and instigate changes at the level of the city. Exploring the idea of participation beyond formal recognition such as residency and citizenship, the paper critically reflects on the right-to-the-city debate's key concept of inhabitance. Focusing on women who – as circular migrants – only reside in Switzerland for a few weeks at a time and who – as live-in workers – are often isolated in private households, the paper argues that work arrangements and mobility are key to understanding inhabitants' right to the city.

Negotiating public spaces to reach their destinations is an everyday struggle for women in India. Indian cities have witnessed a considerable increase in crimes against women, compelling women to avoid or minimize their use of public spaces. This study aims to understand how people and their actions in public spaces shape perceptions of safety amongst women, and how women negotiate public spaces to avoid such incidents of harassment. This study comprising of focus group discussions and in-depth interviews was carried out in Kolkata, India. Visual surveys were conducted to spatially contextualize the narratives from the participants. The data were thereafter transcribed, coded, and analyzed. The study finds that the following elements negatively impact women's perceptions of safety: ‘male gaze’; negative personality traits, appearances, and behavior of men; presence of middle-aged men and strangers; cultural differences; and places that reported repeated occurrences of harassment. Lively spaces and busy roads on the other hand where daily commuters, hawkers, shopkeepers are engaged in purposeful activities are perceived as safe by women. Women make constant efforts to negotiate unsafe conditions in public spaces through avoidance, protection, and prevention. Most women tend to internalize the process of negotiation than to reclaim their rights to public spaces. Younger women, however, tend to step forward and confront their harassers. The findings of this study can help planners and policy makers co-create safer public spaces for women and facilitate their right to the city.

This paper joins the growing scholarly concern for the sharpening of social and environmental inequalities in European cities, particularly those generated in Eastern Europe by evictions of poor Roma from inner-city areas and by the invisibilization of their extreme conditions. We argue that these processes – evictions and invisibilizations – create a heightened vulnerability to climate change impacts for these individuals. The paper uses secondary survey data on compact Roma groups in Romania and analyses qualitative and cartographic information collected by the authors (2019) in two mid-sized cities in Romania to flesh out the particular slum ecologies that emerge following evictions. The focus is also on the subtle processes of invisibilization that render displaced Roma vulnerable and rob them of the “right to the city” in terms of climate change adaptation. Our finding is that evicted Roma experience innumerable, “routine” weather-related impacts, such as floods, storms or cold. By exploring Roma's heightened exposure, sensitivity and reduced adaptive capacity, we show how these impacts increase their vulnerability to future extreme weather events. These findings are indicative of a broader process of fragmentation taking place in urban areas throughout Eastern Europe, which render invisible some very real barriers to climate change adaptation.

In 2014, the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA) introduced the ‘Reclaiming pavements for pedestrians’ plan. This plan, appealing to the Act on Maintaining Public Cleanliness and Public Order, promised to bring ‘safety and orderliness’ to the city, and its implementation led to the removal of street vendors. This article investigates the goals, practices, and effects of the street clean-up plan in Bangkok's old town and shows the ironic consequences of the plan: the streets became less safe. By analysing the vendors' rights, interests, and strategies for coping with the eviction that affected their livelihood, this article focuses on street vendors' survival strategies and analyses various forms of conflicts over streets: the vendors versus city authorities, among the vendors, and the vendors versus powerful gangsters, and discusses the mediation of these conflicts by a senior Buddhist monk who spoke on behalf of street vendors in negotiations with city authorities.

Pedestrianisation, the conversion of a vehicular street for pedestrian use, is increasingly being proposed worldwide as a sustainable measure by hegemonic powers. Pedestrianisation can bolster uneven urban development patterns, however social tensions can magnify on the pedestrianised street, where deprived social groups claim the right to the city. This study employs a mixed method approach to examine, within a de Certeausian theoretical framework, the relationship between the governmental strategies promoting pedestrianisation and the tactics of pedestrianised space informal appropriation. Within this context Hong Kong emerges as a revelatory case, it is a city where the extreme scarcity of public open space exacerbates the conflict between social groups interested in this resource. The analysis provides evidence of a discrepancy between expected and actual uses of the pedestrianised streets. Furthermore, this study highlights the need in the context of the global neoliberal city for discussing the theoretical dichotomy of strategies and tactics. This paper argues for pedestrian planning which includes stationary use as a main pedestrianisation objective, as well as for responsive urban design that carefully considers the association between behavioural patterns and spatial features of the pedestrianised street.

This paper seeks to make a contribution to contemporary urban land insights and political debates in relation to planning in the Ugandan capital, Kampala. It also evaluates how the city authorities engage with communities on land and related urban issues. Scholars have generally ignored the important aspect of community engagement regarding planning in Kampala. Moreover, political power relations seem to influence if not determine social conditions at the grassroots level. In this paper urban land is defined from competing perspectives vis-a-vis lived experiences at the grassroots level. This paper seeks to understand the urban land question through the lens of Henri Lefebvre's writings on the production of space and the right to the city. Questions this study seeks to answer include: Why is politics at the centre of land in Kampala? How is community engagement on land and planning understood by city government? After exploratory research and a review of extant literature, this study utilised an interview guide to collect primary empirical data.

Using the lens of informal Roma settlements in the southwestern periphery of Rome, this article explores Romani approaches to urban space, showing how these are informed by heterogeneous understandings of non-Roma conceptions and practices of (in)formality, (il)legality and (il)licitness. The article also highlights complex and ambivalent attitudes concerning Roma and their informal settlements on the part of non-Roma residents of the neighboring district. Finally, it frames the existence of the informal settlements within the authorities' juggling of formal rejection and informal calculated acceptance of urban informality. The grey spaces that emerge from the convergence of institutional pragmatics of compromise and compassion are connected to governmental discourses that frame informal Roma settlements as dangerous and polluting spaces, and treat their inhabitants as exploitable labor force and politically expendable subjects. Urban (in)formality is also the space that Roma, like many non-Roma, navigate to cope with vulnerability and express their right to the city. Informal Roma settlements thus appear fully embedded in the political, socio-economic and cultural fabric of Rome, which embraces them precisely by treating them as separate polluting spaces.

This article presents key findings of the Right to the City Alliance’s report, We Call These Projects Home: Solving the Housing Crisis from the Ground Up , which documents the effects of public housing policies that are driven by disinvestment, demolition, and privatization. Importantly, the article’s findings and recommendations are based on quantitative and qualitative data from the people impacted by recent trends in public housing policies, a perspective that is underrepresented in the urban planning and policy making discourse. The article challenges the underlying premise of the deconcentration theory by providing evidence that the problems with public housing are due to lack of resources and services in low-income communities, rather than simply the concentration of low-income people. The findings of the report discussed in this article provide a unique and critical contribution to the affordable housing debate by conveying the perspectives and opinions of people impacted by public housing policies. The report’s findings, perhaps unsurprisingly so, diverge from those made in the policy making and academic spheres, namely that public housing is and always has been a vital and necessary option for low-income communities of color. Put simply, residents believe that public housing provides a strong community and want to see public policies that strengthen rather than dismantle it.

For over three decades the US federal government has promoted the rollback of public housing through policies of privatization, deregulation, and devolution of responsibilities to localities. The embracing of austerity by the Obama administration and Congress have only accelerated this long term trend, with new legislation presaging the selling-off of large swaths of the remaining public housing stock. In this context The Right to the City (RTTC), an anti-gentrification group, issued a 2010 report that thoroughly critiques the neoliberal policies that have dismantled public housing communities and the “deconcentrating poverty” ideology that has legitimated this agenda. I identify four strengths the report makes toward building an effective movement to defend and expand public housing in the current hostile political environment. At the same time the report’s silence on the role that nonprofits and foundations have played in promoting privatization is a serious limitation on its effectiveness as a guide and weapon for the audience of pro-public housing activists and academics that the authors’ have, in part, directed their message to. I provide evidence of the direct role foundations and nonprofits have played privatizing public housing, with particular attention placed in post-Katrina New Orleans. Further, I suggest, through a review of a growing body of literature, that foundations also foment accommodation to privatization indirectly through their financing of ostensibly pro-public housing nonprofits.

Finding a physical solution for complex social problems has been one of the dominant approaches in planning experiences since the beginning of 20th century. Expansion of scientific rationality in social science is one of the theoretical foundations of these experiences that led to domination of comprehensive planning as rational and efficient way of doing planning in many cities. After Habermas introduces communicative rationality as an alternative for scientific rationality, many planners have tried to bring his idea in planning and define new roles for planners such as advocates, facilitators, and mediators. This paper does not aim to enter this discussion to define a formal role for planners in exiting planning structure, instead it introduces an informal role for planners as activists outside power structure and planning departments to pursue marginalized citizens’ right to the city. Planning activists, like other kind of activist such as Human Right activists, work with marginalized citizens to raise their voices in existing decision-making processes and power structures. Since Information Technology and Social Media have revolutionized activists’ works in pursuing their causes around the world, this paper discuss how planning activists can use these tools to advocate both parts of citizens’ right to the city, which are right of participation and right of appropriation.

The precursor to this article was published under the title of The right to the city (Cuthbert, 1995). In that work, the interactions between surveillance, private interest and the public domain in Hong Kong were investigated. The paper argued that a real confusion exists with regard to the delineation of social space, a situation underwritten by the processes through which development rights are granted to corporations and ‘big capital’ as a whole. In consequence, the idea of the citizen's right to occupy certain open spaces in the city is rapidly becoming obscured as corporate space becomes conflated to social space. The term ‘ambiguous spaces’ was coined to describe this situation. Below, we refine these ideas by examining in greater detail the actual methods by which ambiguous spaces come into being. Detailed studies have been made to investigate the specificities of this process — how development rights are granted, what conditions are agreed upon and how deals are struck. From this we build a clearer picture of how everyday life in the (post)modern world of Hong Kong has been circumscribed through the discretionary power of the local state, the corporate strategies which direct the form and content of social space, and the deliberate manipulation of the planning system to accommodate private capital. While specific mechanisms and practices are unique to Hong Kong's dynamic political economy, we expose below one aspect of a phenomenon which we would argue increasingly underwrites urban space in western societies as a whole.

This paper looks at the question of urban space in Hong Kong in terms of two simple ideas which have universal as well as local significance. The first addresses the question of surveillance and control over urban space, a strategy on the increase in cities in general, and in Hong Kong in particular. In doing so, fundamental values bearing on the right to the city and the idea of the public domain are called into question. I begin with a brief analysis of the general terrain, analysing the concept of social control within the system of commodity production called capitalism, relating this to the phenomenon of surveillance and its essential characteristics. The concept of the public domain is then interrogated in principle and in relation to Hong Kong's unique brand of politics, where the monopolistic nature of the local economy concentrates the production of social space in central areas into the hands of a few powerful corporations. Next, in order to investigate how such authority intersects with state legitimation, the economic, legal and administrative facets of development are analysed so that their spatial consequences may be revealed. Here the rapid extermination of a rich cultural use of space and its replacement by the Kleenex commodity spaces of the market can be seen. Ominously, the organization and design of these new spaces coincide with an increased capacity for surveillance in a multiplicity of different forms. Finally, several new developments are examined in order to demonstrate the nature of this control. I conclude with an agenda for the public realm which it is hoped will outlast the take over by the People's Republic of China in two years' time.