Search

The purpose of this study was to analyse the impacts of the urban regeneration on small businesses in preparation to host the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games and the reactions of owners of such businesses toward the changes. This research focused on the effects of urban regeneration on small business located in the Olympic Green cluster of Beijing 2022, which has been the one with major changes. Owners of small businesses were interviewed two years before the Games. Whilst owners revealed that they have not taken part in the process of planning the urban regeneration, they have been willing to sacrifice their profits as a sign of patriotism. Meanwhile, they expressed their frustration with their no-right-to-the-city. The study applies the right-to-the-city theoretical framework to sport mega-event-led urban regeneration. The application of the theoretical framework transcends the case of Beijing 2022.

Reform Judaism is one of the dominant religious movements in the contemporary Jewish world and is known primarily for its liberal approach, such as advocating for gender equality in Jewish religiou...

This article shows that women’s formal political citizenship is intertwined with the right to the city. Using Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be’ approach, we study how female municipal councillors argued for more public toilets in Sweden's three largest cities. In their motions, the lack of public conveniences was mainly related to a binary discourse of gender, and arguments referring to biological needs of the female body and women as mothers proved more successful than the argument that uneven access to public toilets was an example of gender inequality. Class-based arguments against fees were largely ignored when the motions were transformed from potentially contentious political issues into technical issues of urban planning and municipal utilities. However, the material effects of the policies—public toilets placed mainly in working-class areas—led to an extension of possible radiuses of movement within the city for women, and perhaps especially working-class women. (Less)

We highlight how the intentions of a government to improve services and transparency across a city, by providing an enhanced right to the city for the urban poor can be futile when political gatekeeping is not relinquished at the grassroots level and the poor are not mobilised and educated about their rights. A qualitative case study of poor informal settlements was conducted in Rajshahi Bangladesh, to investigate a greater right to the city as the result of a ‘citizens charter’ initiated by local government. This research focusses on the poorest of the poor, who are often overlooked in community-based research due to their inability to attract the support of NGOs and donors means they are particularly vulnerable to this system of urban patron-clientism. We find that attempts by the city government to improve services to the poorest of its citizens is hampered by entrenched patron client practices perpetuated by local political representatives of the city government acting as gatekeepers, blocking access to services for the urban poor.

The paper focuses on the transformation of the Angolan and Mozambican capital cities with regards to the neoliberal context, taking into account local socio-spatial legacies. Following the theoreti...

Portuguese-speaking African countries, namely Angola and Mozambique, faced important political-economic and social transformations after their liberations in 1975. Given the geopolitical context of...

This paper addresses the experience of revanchist urban transition among street-based sex workers—male, female and transgender individuals—in Bangalore city in India, over the last two decades. Whi...

This paper focuses on how residents of public housing in Hawaiʻi view residents from Micronesia, a geographic region of Oceania. Drawing on in-depth interviews with an ethnically diverse sample, we...

Due to a lack of available job opportunities in the formal sector and financial resources, in most parts of the developing world the urban poor rely on access to urban public space for earning thei...

Lefebvre’s “right to the city” concept is often used to describe how individuals are challenging late capitalism and neoliberal development by appropriating urban space for collective use. While so...

This paper uses a novel qualitative visual methodology—scoping—to interrogate the Lefebvrian right to the city across the social movement landscape of Thessaloniki, Greece. Generating a reflexive a...

The category of the right to the city, conceptualized over five decades ago by the French Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre, is currently experiencing its second life. It has becom...

Collaborative short-term accommodation rental platforms have grown enormously in Europe in the last decade and the resulting disruptive impacts are widespread in city neighbourhoods. Such impacts a...

Rights-based urban social movements have proliferated since the mid-1970s, but our understanding of their real impacts remains insufficient. Using the housing movements in Sao Paulo as an example, ...

This article introduces the notion of algorithmic spatiality as a way to capture the unique spatial knowledge created by digital mobile media, and the way that this knowledge acts upon space, and i...

West Ridge in Accra, Ghana, a residential enclave for colonial administrators is being produced again to serve as the financial center of the country. The area is identified after one building: Wor...

The right to the city theory was born from a desire to challenge power and decision-making processes in the urban space that privilege certain groups over others. Growing neoliberalist ideals have ...

In the article the author highlights the main ways of the Lefebvrian sociological analysis conceived starting from the transformations of the city in the Fordist era: From the production of urban m...

Housing is one of the defining social policy issues of our time. There is growing recognition that the housing market is failing and causing widespread damage, but alternatives struggle against dee...

The last decade has seen the rise of a new alliance among U.S. housing advocates, human rights advocates, and right to the city advocates that stands unified in opposition to rising rents, gentrifi...

Recent critical scholarship regarding the right to the city suggests that the concept inadequately addresses the function of rights within urban socio-legal processes. This paper draws from various...

This is a collection of grassroots perspectives on urban politics in Salvador, Brazil and London, UK. Specifically, the work aims to explore to what extent concepts such as the ‘right to the city’ ...

In contemporary neoliberal regimes, urban disaster governance typically emphasises resilience of cities and their inhabitants. Marginalised urban people, most vulnerable to disasters, are thereby e...

Research on contemporary urban movements analyse how young people assert their right to the city by using street protests and occupations to physically reclaim urban space. Through an ethnographic ...

This paper evaluates the compatibility of public–private partnerships (PPP) for housing in Brazil with the notion of the right to the city, enshrined in the Constitution. A 3-year investigation of ...

The article applies a field theory approach to further the analysis of grassroots movements in an urban context. By employing the theoretical framework of Strategic Action Fields merged with the co...

This paper explores the politics of running in the fragmented city of Jerusalem. Through a series of ‘run-alongs’ – an innovative method of talking while running – with members of the city’s first ...

This article characterizes spatial planning in Brazil from a normative point of view. Because of Brazil’s vast geography and uneven development, it is not possible to describe how spatial planning is carried out in all quarters of the country. We explore key aspects of spatial planning in the country using policy goals, the legal and administrative structures where planning operates and the attributes of governance in the Brazilian planning system. The interplay between formal and informal urban development is a crucial aspect in Brazilian planning. Despite huge steps towards citizen engagement and inclusion in planning processes, planning remains largely technocratic.

Consumption is a political relationship. This article considers competing political discourses around consumption as different versions of a hypothetical right to consume. In the first sect...

This study engages Yuri Herrera’s novel Trabajos del reino (2004) to zoom in on the way in which drug lords besiege concrete and symbolic spaces in cities. I argue that drug lord El Rey’s conquerin...

In times of globalization we are facing a crisis of care. The invisibility of relations of domination and oppression against nature, women and girls, as well as the elderly, generate inequalities and structural problems that increase the unsustainability of life on the planet. The uncertainty towards the future, generated by climate change, pollution and scarcity of water resources, is leading us towards war or revolution – a revolution that requires the involvement of the new generations to transform reality and confront contemporary problems. In this sense, it is necessary to educate, raise awareness and empower girls and boys in citizen participation, in overcoming gender inequalities and in the development of fairer and more sustainable practices and behaviours. The participatory action-research experience with social cartography ‘From the Body to the City’, promoted by the Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Management – INGENIO (CSIC-UPV) in collaboration with the primary school CEIP Vicente Gaos of Valencia (Spain), developed together with the students of 4th primary grade, intended to reflect and act collectively on our territories from the principles of transformative education and global citizenship.

This article investigates the role played by cultural initiatives in urban struggles in South Africa, and the emergence of public art to assert the right to the city. I explore how artistic–activist interventions engage an understanding of social justice and the right to the city in provocative visual and performance art. I demonstrate how such interventions reflect Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the city as a space to be inhabited in an active process, which critically includes its re-imagination.The paper focuses on creative interventions in Cape Town that confronted the city’s genteel public space with the second and third anniversary of the shooting of 34 striking miners at Marikana on August 16 2012. I argue that bringing the commemoration of the massacre into the public urban space – where post-apartheid Cape Town exhibits its claim to cosmopolitanism – challenges the politics of space in South Africa. I asked, how these cultural initiatives articulate claims through reimagining the city ho...

The ‘right to the city’ has influenced the New Urban Agenda and other global and national urban policies. In the process, the meaning has narrowed towards realizing human rights in cities. Pursuing the right to housing in South Africa has established an important duty on the state to ensure universal access to decent accommodation. This has enabled millions of the poorest households to obtain improved habitation, and others to gain protection against forced evictions. However, the single-minded focus on state delivery of mass housing has been unable to keep pace with the rising level of need. It has also neglected the economic requirements of households and is proving to be financially unsustainable. Consequently, the housing right has not lifted many people out of income poverty or created more inclusive cities. A rights-based approach needs to be complemented by collective action and strengthened capabilities to drive progress across a broader agenda than just housing, particularly at the local ...

Austerity policies and the bankruptcy of the welfare state in Spain since the crisis of 2008 have mobilized the population to demand new models of urban governance, an improvement of basic services...

This article aims to produce an analysis of the politicization of the citizens after Spain’s Indignados movement from a citizenship framework. The article suggests that claiming the right to the ci...

This paper explores the relationship between property and gentrification, building on a case study of the neighbourhood of Mar Mikhael (Beirut, Lebanon). First, we discuss the ways in which the dis...

The widely discussed gang rape in December 2012 in New Delhi marked a significant moment in the public discourse around women’s safety and sexual violence in India. From expressions of shock and ho...

By engaging with the ‘Gezi/June’ Uprising in Turkey and the popular assemblies formed in its aftermath, this article foregrounds the notion of agonistic pluralism as advanced by William E. Connolly...

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger ch...

This paper is a slightly revised version of the 2017 Geografiska Annaler B Lecture, which I gave at the Nordic Geography Meeting in Stockholm. It seeks to show why Guy Debord’s ([(1967) 1994]. The ...

Revolution and the Critique of Human Geography. Prospects for the Right to the City After 50 Years’ is the paper that Don Mitchell read for the plenary lecture at the 7th Nordic Geographic Meet, held in Stockholm in June 2017. The paper was the Geografiska Annaler B Lecture, at the invi- tation Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and the conference organizers. Proceeding from the premise that ‘revolution is a geographical act’, Mitchell relies on two key revolutionary thinkers cum protagonists to convey the profoundly spatial nature of revolution. The first, Henri Lefebvre is a well-known thinker in geographical circles not least through his oft- cited 1967 text The Right to The City, with the likes of David Harvey, Edward Soja, Neil Smith, Andy Merrifield, Bob Shields, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden, and of course Don Mitchell himself, as interlocutors. The second protagonist, Guy Debord is a significant thinker in his own right, Lefebvre’s former student and political antagonist, well known in Marxian, media, film and cultural theory, but not so well known in geographical circles. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1995) is a pioneer work on commodified life, culture and power in the contemporary (Merrifield 2004). It is only apposite then that Mitchell grants Debord more space (15 entries on The Society of the Spectacle compared to the 4 or 5 entries on the Right to the City) in his deliberations on revo- lution. Even with the numbered format (reminiscent of Debord’s numbered Theses), one can discern an introduction, corpus and a coda. In what follows, I present my take on Don Mitchell’s lecture/ paper by focusing on two themes. The first revolves around issues of time and history, the second is parallel readings of Debord-Mitchell on questions of space, revolution and the critique of human geography. I wind up by offering an alternative take on revolution and the critique of human geography.

Anniversaries, whether personal or more collective in nature, can be significant opportunities for reflecting on where we are and where we might want to head. That is even when their arbitrary nume...

In this article, we discuss the possibilities for and challenges to the urban planning process at the neighbourhood level, from the perspective of the right to the city. We focus on the 2 de Julho,...

Employing qualitative and ethnographic data from field research in 2009 and 2017 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this article seeks to position urban housing and the home at the center of discussions a...

This essay critically examines the relationship between capitalism, development, and settler colonialism using Kakaʻako, an urban district of Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, as a case study. Given that Kakaʻako...

Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strategies and infrastructures. Specifically, we identify rights regimes rooted in explications of a city ideal and a neighborhood ethic. We suggest that Portland’s widely admired transit planning process has not sufficiently engaged with informal use rights in transit spaces, leading to uneven adoption of a transportation infrastructure that re-inscribes historic racialized injustices. An examination of informal use rights complicates common rights analytics, including those leveraging Lefebvre’s right to the city, emphasizing how all urban rights are contingen...

Britain’s town centres have witnessed economic, social and physical upheaval over more than half a century, linked to sweeping changes in retailing and consumption. Yet they are also places where activists are seeking to fashion alternative futures and test social and economic models that challenge neoliberal norms. Reflecting on recent developments in the UK, this paper explores the potential of citizen-led economic activism in British town and city centres. Focusing on three case studies of urban activism, it contrasts policies and practices that frame the users of urban space as consumers with the marginal acts that seek to assert wider rights to the city. The article shows how ideas of ‘resilience’ have become a stake of struggle in debates over the future of urban centres and urban citizenship, deployed both to defend neoliberal economic configurations and to signal radical transitions towards more participatory and economically autonomous forms of society.

After Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1990), Chile’s post-dictatorial governments drew on market-based policies to develop large-scale subsidised housing projects and, accordingly, avoid the ...

The capital of Ecuador, as a case study, is here used to show how policies regarding urban heritage may improve urban democratic standards and practices by supporting popular participation to redef...