The Right to the City: Lefebvre, Harvey and Marcuse Explained

The right to the city is the claim that the people who inhabit a city have the right not only to use it but to decide collectively how it is produced, transformed and shared. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre formulated it in 1968, in the book of the same title, and since then it has moved from academic slogan to legal principle, enshrined in Ecuador's 2008 Constitution, Brazil's 2001 City Statute and the United Nations New Urban Agenda of 2016. Three authors mark its path: Lefebvre, who invented it; David Harvey, who updated it as a collective right against capital; and Peter Marcuse, who asked whose right it is and to which city.

Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city of 1968

Lefebvre wrote The Right to the City on the eve of May 1968, when functionalist planning and the grand housing estates were driving urban life out of French cities. His right to the city is not a right to visit the centre or to receive services, but a right to the oeuvre, to participation and to appropriation: to make the city as one makes a collective work, to intervene in the decisions that produce it and to use space according to the needs of life rather than of market exchange. It is, he says, a cry and a demand, not a rule.

David Harvey: a collective right over the urban surplus

Harvey took up the idea in the essay The Right to the City (2008) and in Rebel Cities (2012). For him, urbanization is the process through which capital absorbs its surpluses by building and rebuilding the city, and so the right to the city is the right to control that surplus: to decide what is built, for whom and with what resources. It is a collective right, not an individual one, because the city is the product of the common labour of those who inhabit it, and exercising it requires movements able to contest power over the urban process, like those Harvey documents from Paris in 1871 to the squares of 2011.

Peter Marcuse: whose right and to which city

Marcuse, in the article From critical urban theory to the right to the city (2009), introduced the awkward questions. Whose right: not everyone's equally, but that of those deprived of essentials, the excluded, and of those alienated even with a roof and a job, the discontented. To which city: not the existing one, which already belongs to those who dominate it, but a future city that must be built. And how: through a strategy that exposes the causes of injustice, proposes alternatives and politicises those who suffer them. Without that specificity, he warns, the right to the city becomes a slogan any government can adopt without changing anything.

From principle to practice: laws, movements and instruments

In practice, the right to the city has been translated into concrete instruments: the social function of property and the participatory plans of Brazil's City Statute, participatory budgets, policies for regularising informal settlements, the defence of public space against privatisation and struggles against evictions and gentrification. Organisations such as the Global Platform for the Right to the City have made it a framework for international advocacy. Each translation loses some of Lefebvre's radicalism but widens its reach.

The open question is the tension between the right to the city as a legal principle and as a project of transformation. Recognised by laws and agendas, it risks becoming a catalogue of services; kept as a demand of movements, it retains its force but depends on movements able to exercise it. Lefebvre, Harvey and Marcuse agree on the essential point: the city is a collective work, and the right to decide about it belongs to those who make it every day, not to those who own it.