Part 2 : 
Engaging with the Right to the City
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PART 2: Engaging with the Right to the City

Is the Right to the City a Right or a Revolution?



Magali Fricaudet



From a catastrophist point of view, we could probably say that the unprecedented rate of urbanization that the world is currently experiencing is a realization of the more destructive tendencies of capitalism, where life is at serious stake. Indeed, urbanization seems to have no end, as the ideology of growth predominates. In 1920, urban centers represented just 30 per cent of the world population; the proportion of urban dwellers over rural ones will be inverted around 2030—rising to 66 per cent according to the UN Human Settlement Program, UN-Habitat.[3] In that context, since the late 1990s, Henri Lefebvre’s “right to the city” has appeared as a claim among a diversity of voices—from neighborhood struggles to local government calls for local democracy—that denounces the “competitive city model.”



As cities increasingly represent centers of capital accumulation, and the commodification of life in all its aspects, Lefebvre’s The Right to the City is all the more poignant as an inspiration for the “urban revolution” that he called for as a social practice. Conceiving the right to the city based on its use value, instead of its exchange value, as a way to free citizens from private property and spatialized class relations, has influenced a diversity of interpretations and practices that share the goal to take back the city as a common good—a place for collective emancipation and freedom. At the same time, the exercise of municipal power inspired by the right to the city, in the case of municipalist experiences in Spain since 2014, have also shown the limits of realizing such rights at the local level, as well as the contradictions in exercising institutional power in the hegemonic capitalist city model.

The Paradigm of the Urban Miracle, or How Global Capitalism Has Reached Massive Consent



The preamble of the “New Urban Agenda,” adopted by UN-Habitat member States at Quito in October 2016, enshrines the blindness of the so-called “international community” through describing urbanization as an
unprecedented opportunity for humanity, and cities as great engines of growth.



The current hegemonic view of cities corresponds to what Bookchin denounced as a poor “spatial and demographic” conception, “viewing the city as an area occupied by a closely interlocked, densely populated human community”—a definition in “quantitative terms.” That is, totally in contradiction with his view on the city, which he considered to be a “uniquely human, ethical and ecological community whose members often lived in balance with nature and created institutional forms that sharpened human self-awareness, fostered rationality, created a secularized culture, enhanced individuality and established institutional forms of freedom” (Bookchin, Urbanization against Cities, Black Rose Books, 1992, Introduction, p. XIV). In Bookchin’s perception, citification does not mean an opposition between nature and human beings. Referring to what Cicero called a “second nature,” that is “a humanly made nature that exists in balance with the first nature” (ibid, Introduction, p. X), citification is a realization of the natural mutualist tendency of humans to gather and form freely consenting communities. This is why Bookchin denounced urbanization as a result of the accumulation of power by some elites, based on individualism and endless consumption as a “cancerous phenomenon.”



Today, cities are where 80 per cent of global GDP is produced and, although cities are responsible for 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions and inequalities at city levels have grown faster than at national levels in the past two decades,[4] UN-Habitat affirms that “good management and planning processes” could counter these negative externalities.



Megacities have grown at an unprecedented rate; in 2015, there were 503 cities of more than one million inhabitants, compared with 162 in 1975. Large metropolitan areas are key hubs of value in the international economy, representing huge markets and extremely rapid flows of capital. They are strategic places of specialization within the international division of work, as some cities in the global south, such as Dhaka, Bangladesh, host a very cheap workforce with limited labor rights, while others, such as London, New York or Tokyo, compete to be centers of high-level decisionmaking within the markets and where elites are concentrated. Cities are central to the capitalist economy as they also represent huge markets, where “consumption” patterns belie high levels of inequality. Most of the time, the mass of “urban poor” settled in the “informal neighborhoods” of peripheral areas are compelled to pay higher prices for basic services, which the public sector does not provide.



With 1 billion people living in slums among over 3 billion urban dwellers, cities have become the only viable option for a large number of internal and external migrants, pushed around by global climate change, and free trade agreements imposed by the European Union, Canada and United States on their countries, devastating their agriculture. Most people move to urban areas
with the hope of accessing the kinds of services and opportunities concentrated in cities.



As David Harvey (2003) writes, city economies are also largely based on a process of “accumulation by dispossession,” meaning that in front of the high demand for urban land and housing, the unregulated real estate market is realizing huge profits on people’s homes, creating massive segregation processes. Indeed, the real estate market was so high in the global markets during the subprime crisis of 2008 that it marked the beginning of a global financial and economic crisis, unprecedented since the 1930s. According to Saskia Sassen (2016), the huge flows of international capital onto real estate markets in some metropolises, such as London, are now provoking much further consequences than gentrification: they replace traditional elites with international ones (Sassen, 2016)—the famous 1 per cent that controls 82 per cent of the wealth (Oxfam, 2018). The UN Special Rapporteur on housing rights, in her report of February 2017, commented:





The value of global real estate is about US$ 217 trillion, nearly 60 per cent of the value of all global assets, with residential real estate comprising 75 per cent of the total.... Housing is at the center of an historic structural transformation in global investment and the economies of the industrialized world with profound consequences for those in need of adequate housing. (Report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to nondiscrimination in this context A/HRC/34/51, p. 3)





At the same time, fierce urbanization has led to a progressive concentration of power in some decentralized metropolitan areas, and resistance movements have developed locally and globally.

Lefebvre and the Philosophy of Urban Revolution



In the late 1960s, from the radical urban sociologist, the “Marxian” Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City called for “the right to urban life, to a renewed centrality, to places of meetings and exchanges, to a rhythm of life that allows the full and entire use of these moments and places.”[5] For Lefebvre, the right to the city refers both to a social practice of the working class that defends the use value of the city, instead of its exchange value, and to a narrative that he calls “urban revolution.” Lefebvre refers to a post-modern acceptation of the working class as the “dispossessed of the city.” Lefebvre writes, “As one hundred years ago,[6] although in new conditions, the working class gather the interests (beyond time and superficiality) of the whole society and first of all, of those who inhabit” (Ibid, p. 108).[7]



He refers to the inhabitants as suffering the misery of “everydayness,” as managed by the bureaucratic bourgeoisie leading the city. The everydayness of the students, of the intellectuals, of the workers, of the
colonized who go every day from their house to the station to take a crowded train or bus to go to the office and go back home to begin again the day after. He pictures the generalized misery of the masses that escape or dissimulate the poorness of everyday life through the satisfactions of urban society, such as commodified culture, hobbies and even nature.



Lefebvre denounces urbanism and the functionalist approach of cities as a political process that underpins the financial sector, which together produces space and alienated time, thus producing power. The technocratic approach of capitalist power to produce the city and space separates the functions of life originally gathered in cities in order to produce and reproduce class relations.



In Marxist theory, social classes are defined as a function of their position in the relations of production between capital and work in industrial society. The modern urbanization phenomenon makes this frame of analysis burst. Lefebvre introduces space and the production of space as the center of the production of social relations and of the reproduction of the relations of production, because of the increasing exchange value of space. In that regard, western cities, from the political cities of antiquity and the commercial cities of the middle ages have suffered from the increase of exchange relations created by capitalist elites. The critical turning point of the city is the process of industrialization—urbanization at the end of the eighteenth century, which made the city burst, leading to its expansion in a dialectic phenomenon of explosion—implosion. So space and inertia explains the survival of capitalism and the eternally renewed expectation of the final crisis.



Rational planning of the production, organization of the territory, industrialization and urbanization are essential features of the “socialization of society,” which fix predetermined functions in the space of the city and allow it to maintain order. In that regard, urban struggles, through reowning the city, are strategic in the struggle against capital (Claire Revol, 2017).



Thus the space of cities depends on class strategies that produce a segregation of urban spaces, demolishing the idea of cities as shared common spaces, and of the centrality of the notion of the social form of the city— one of gathering and coexistence. In that sense, as Bookchin does, Lefebvre shows that throughout history, cities have been the work of societies, spaces that relate to usage and urban life instead of the product of an exchange value. The right to the city is a claim for transforming life through transforming cities, creating them as collective pieces of work. Hence, the praxis of the right to the city refers to the ideas of struggle and celebration at the same time. Lefebvre used to refer to the creative dimension of the Commune of Paris as a way for the working classes to take back the city that Haussman’s work had spoiled from people. Against the functionalist city
that separates the diverse dimensions of life in the space, he invites us to take back citizenship through creativity, spontaneity and self-organization processes of re-owning the city. In that sense, he is in tune with the May 68 movement.



Indeed, Lefebvre was a researcher and teacher at the University of Nanterre, a newly built campus located between the slums of the Parisian working class periphery. The May 68 movement really began on 22 March 1968 in the University of Nanterre when a group of students occupied the administration tower of the campus, denouncing the arbitrary authority of the so-called “Mandarin,” the omnipotent administrative council of the university led by professors. His group of researchers from the philosophy department of Nanterre inspired the 68 movement. When referring to the idea of celebration and enjoyment of the city, his thought is situated in an insurrectional and creative movement, strongly marked by leftist ideals that demand freedom and new models against the class domination of work and consumption.

The Emergence of the Right to the City as a Global Claim for Socio-Spatial Justice



Since the 1970s, Lefebvre’s ideas have acted as a reference for diverse forms of insurgent citizenship that claims ownership of the city—in front of massive investments that evict people from cities, in front of gentrification processes. They also constitute a theoretical basis for movements that occupy public space against its privatization. The South African movement Abahlali baseMjondolo,[8] inspired by Lefebvre, defends the legitimacy of squatters to occupy urban space. They argue against the interpretation by the government of the World Bank’s slogan “cities without slums,” which has led to evictions through entitling the owners of shacks (but not dwellers) as land tenants and through privatizing the management of services in renewed neighborhoods. In Durban, 2006, this movement assembled 50,000 shack dwellers from across the country to fight for land reforms and dignity. They occupy land as a way of reclaiming the dispossession— urbanization process, and denounce the accumulation of land by elites, as well as the inaction of the South African State to fulfill social housing programs. The anti-State[9] process approach of this movement clearly fits within Lefebvre’s vision (Marianne Morange, 2017).



At the same time, Lefebvre insisted that the most revolutionary principles of the right to the city would include land reform, as this would have occurred during revolutions of the agrarian age, where the tenancy of land was key to freeing peasants and agrarian workers from landlords. For Lefebvre, the collective tenure of land in cities against private property, which maintains the monopoly of production of space under financial interests, is one of the key issues of the urban revolution.[10]



The social function of land and the city as a strong feature of the right to the city has inspired the claim of many unentitled occupants, mainly in Latin America where urban rights and human rights have a long common history. Supported by NGOs such as Habitat International Coalition (HIC) in their struggle to stay in the city and be recognized as city producers, the right to the city became a more holistic claim than the right to housing in the late 1990s. Promoted through the World Inhabitants Assembly during the Earth Summit of Rio in 1992 under the banner “cities for life, not for profit,” HIC developed a “World Charter for the Right to the City,” later adopted by social movements in the World Social Forum in 2005. The Charter was developed as an instrument to promote the recognition and legislation of human rights in an urban context and to change the narrative around the “urban poor” as beneficiaries of tiny neighborhood improvement programs. In the context of the Charter, the right to the city is defined as:





the equitable usufruct of cities within the principles of sustainability, democracy, equity, and social justice. It is the collective right of the inhabitants of cities, in particular of the vulnerable and marginalized groups, that confers upon them legitimacy of action and organization, based on their uses and customs, with the objective to achieve full exercise of the right to free self-determination and an adequate standard of living. The Right to the City is interdependent of all internationally recognized and integrally conceived human rights, and therefore includes all the civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights which are already regulated in the international human rights treaties. (World Charter for the Right to the City, Art. 2 )





The World Charter is a compromise, the result of its institutional purpose to serve as an advocacy tool aimed at introducing the right to the city in international, national and local legislation as an urban component of the “right to development” and as a way to protect people from the arbitrary power of city developers. This claim has received strong opposition from governments, mainly in international negotiations around the so-called “New Urban Agenda,” The Declaration of Quito (2016) where the inclusion of the right to the city and some of its principles, such as the social value of land and the city or the prevention of forced evictions, in the international document crystallized tense discussions between the richest countries (led by the US and the EU) and some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Chili, and Ecuador.



In the meantime, by the end of the twentieth century, Lefebvre’s The Right to the City had inspired local and national legislations trying to counterbalance the commodification of land, housing and, most generally, the city. One of the most famous examples is the Brazilian Constitution of 1988,
translated into the City Statute of 2001. The City Statute refers to the “social function of property,” introducing tools to control the land, facilitating the regularization of occupying people and establishing financial mechanisms to correct socio-spatial inequalities. In 2008, the Constitution of Ecuador enshrines the right to the city in the following words:





Persons have the right to fully enjoy the city and its public spaces, on the basis of principles of sustainability, social justice, respect for different urban cultures and a balance between the urban and rural sectors. Exercising the right to the city is based on the democratic management of the city, with respect to the social and environmental function of property and the city and with the full exercise of citizenship. (Art.11).





This institutionalization of the right to the city also questions the polysemiotic notion of rights that Lefebvre used. A right is essentially attached to all human beings as a guarantee against arbitrariness (civil and political rights) and a guarantee of decent life (economic, cultural and environmental rights). Rights are instruments protected and guaranteed by nation-states and aim at protecting people against the arbitrary power of those same states. Lefebvre’s initial conception was probably more performative in the sense of affirming a right as a social practice and a perspective for urban revolution. For Lefebvre, who was a dialectical thinker, “in difficult conditions, within this society that cannot totally oppose them but at the same time block them, rights are finding their way, defining civilization (rights are at the same time in and against society, through but often against culture.),”[11] he writes. At the same time, the polysemiotic nature of the word right intrinsically connects the right to the city with a diversity of interpretations and that is perhaps the more powerful meaning of the right to the city, although it could also be its main weakness as this makes it vulnerable to possible misunderstandings.



In a rough capitalist urbanization context, the right to the city is an inspiration for an approach that protects the use value against the voracious appetites of the markets. Are the experiences of municipalism relevant for the process of taking back the city against the long-lasting process of capitalist dispossession that the people of cities have suffered?

Municipalities: At the Forefront of the Right to the City?



From the beginning of the 2000s, under the lead of Porto Alegre and Barcelona City Hall, the locally elected Left took their place in parallel with the World Social Forum as a place to renew political views after the collapse of the Soviet bloc.



In that framework, locally elected representatives of urban social movements and NGOs enabled a dialogue that led to discussions around
the narrative of the right to the city as an alternative to the “competitive and smart city” model. As a result of this process, the “Global Charter Agenda for Human Rights in the City,” adopted in 2011 in the framework of the organization United Cities and Local Governments,[12] refers to the right to the city.



Later, in 2016, the right to the city became a common claim around the preparation of the Habitat III Summit. Through the Global Platform for the Right to the City,[13] created by the HIC and Polis Institute (a Brazilian NGO that has supported the Brazilian movements of occupants in the city and pushed for the adoption of the City Statute), NGOs, searchers and local governments gathered to advocate for the inclusion of the right to the city in the New Urban Agenda.



In 2010, the Charter for the Right to the City of the city of Mexico, driven by social movements, represented a further step in the institutionalization of the right to the city. Without enough binding processes to translate it into concrete actions, it defines a framework of shared responsibility between the various actors within the city. The right to the city rests upon six principles:




respect, protection and realization of all human rights (civic, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental);





the social function of property, land and the city;





the democratic governance of villages, towns and metropolitan areas, which supposes a strong decentralization framework;





recognition of the social production of habitat and of the social and solidarity-based nature of the economy, as supported by the social production of habitat;





democratic and collective management of common goods— environmental and cultural—through a global vision that is not limited by administrative boundaries;





the protection and improvement of public spaces, including infrastructure and community facilities, through supporting inhabitants’ initiatives and precluding privatization.





This reformist view of the right to the city has influenced the creation of community-based district improvement programs, initiated by civil society organizations and then included as public policy. For example, Mexico City is often used as a reference against the World Bank doctrine of “cities without slums.” The translation of the right to the city into local public policies underlines the tensions that constitute the city, resulting in a very contradictory exercise of power by so-called progressive local governments.



Since the 2015 municipal elections in Spain, it seems that other narratives have appeared that affirm the centrality of the right to the city and the ownership of people before capitalist interests. After the occupations of places in 2011, the “indignados” rooted the movement into neighborhood assemblies. In the Spanish municipal elections of 2014, in 60 towns and cities, local coalitions comprised of diverse struggles and movements and supported by leftist and ecological parties structured themselves to take the city back. Their organization was based on strong ethical codes to prevent corruption and to guarantee accountability of locally elected representatives, and on participatory programs based on feminized politics in contrast to the conception of a concentrated and competitive exercise of power. Cities meant the possibility of changing everyday life, implementing mutualist and community-based solutions, which nation-states (with their promiscuous relationships with private interests) are incapable of. Spanish municipalism relies on the commons as a necessary alternative to the market. It organizes programs that articulate movements and heterogeneous spaces of struggle, which have thus far acted in parallel (ecologists, activists for water as a common good, activists for the right to health and education, feminist groups, anti-racist movements, hackers, and supporters of free culture and of the neutrality of networks, defenders of social and solidarity economy, etc.) (Subirats, 2018).



Nevertheless, in more than three years of exercising power—sometimes based on weak majorities in the councils—their impact on the disastrous effects of the financialized economy have been limited. The structure of the administration based on rigid hierarchies and limited decentralization strongly limits their capacity for action. In Barcelona, for instance, the team of Ada Colau (the mayor elected on a municipalist agenda who came from a housing rights movement) made strong efforts to take back empty buildings and spaces to create housing cooperatives, to negotiate with banks to create social housing in the flats left empty by mortgage-related evictions, to fine Airbnb and landlords who rent flats without authorization, to count and tax vacant housing, to stop touristic flats and hotel in the city center, to purchase property for social housing, to impose restrictions that every new construction or rehabilitation project includes a minimum of 30 per cent of affordable housing. Yet, despite all of these measures, the rental market housing speculation process is at a climax in Barcelona. The exercise of power in cities, which is intrinsically marked by a diversity of interests, is always inherently contradictory.



For instance, one of the more paradoxical aspects of governing is that Barcelona’s administration, in order to fight real estate companies operating in connivance with drug dealers, is now closing empty flats and installing anti-squatter doors in the popular central neighborhood of the Raval. Indeed, after the mortgage crisis of 2008, leading to the eviction of
thousands of dwellers from their flats in Barcelona, a high quantity of housing was reclaimed by banks and remained vacant. Now that the prices of housing are increasing again under the pressure of tourism and few rental properties are available, real estate companies have been accused of collaborating with drug dealers to despoil the district of the Raval. In 2016, a wave of flat occupations by drug dealers led to the mobilization of their neighbors, denouncing their occupation, and the violence associated with drug dealing and the speculative goal of these occupations. Organizing through WhatsApp, and gathering to denounce traffickers in the streets, neighborhood groups prompted the end of speculative “narco-flats.” In front of the inaction of international banks and investment funds to evict occupying dealers from their properties—despite City Hall demands—the elected team had no alternative other than to use police intervention to evict dealers from the flats and close them with anti-squatter doors.



Another contradictory action of Barcelona’s municipality was also be the way that City Hall acted towards the Senegalese street vendors, who survive by selling counterfeit goods. Indeed, under pressure from local merchants to denounce the unfair competition from street vendors, in the summer 2016, Barcelona City Hall launched an anti-counterfeit campaign in multiple languages—inviting people not to buy from illegal street vendors but to buy from local shops instead.



Cities are intersected by a diversity of interests, where certain interests clearly predominate. In that context, the pressure to act in favor of the most powerful is high. Although governing according to “the people’s wishes” is a commitment, this is somehow difficult to respect. Governance as action is a complex exercise. Barcelona’s government asserts that it tries to do its best within a very hostile political and media context, and for this they need people to stay in the streets and attempt to find a “conflictual collaboration” between the street and the institution.

What if Urban Revolution Meant Permanent Insurrection?



Fifty years after Lefebvre wrote The Right to the City, where he denounced the total absurdity of the dominant alliance of bureaucratic and private interests, which led the city to fulfill the interests of elites, neoliberalism has increasingly foisted the totalities of the economic system upon city life. Is it possible then, within the current financialized economy, to guarantee the right to the city from a municipalist perspective when cities are places where so much wealth is generated and which have served the interests of production and consumption since times of industrialization?



Referring to the progressive concentration of land into fewer hands, Lefebvre spoke about the ruralization of cities. From that view, perhaps it is time to look to occupying rural areas to prevent their urbanization, and then try to citify the rural world—in the sense of Bookchin’s city as an
ecosociety, far away from the necrotic metropolitan way of life. Worldwide mobilizations against megaprojects in the last decades have carved a new path for creating ecosocieties.



In its resistance against Nantes’ new airport in Noter-Dame-des-Landes in France, the ZAD movement is a clear example of this. In French law, Zone d’Amenagement Differe (ZAD) means an area owned by public authorities to make a project in partnership with business companies. In Noter-Dames-des-Landes, a ZAD was created in the 1960s to build a new airport in Nantes. Farmers and local residents have resisted this project since that time. In 2009, when the project was relaunched by public authorities, ecologists and libertarian activists from the Climate Camp occupied this land. They renamed the territory ZAD for Zone d’Autonomie et de Defense (Zone of Defense and Autonomy), creating a self-organized area based on autonomy from capitalism, radical ecology and de-growth. Fighting a high degree of repression, the movement received support from a large part of leftist and ecologist movements, leading to the cancellation of the project by the French government in 2018. Since the airport project was halted, Zadists have continued to fight to live in autonomy in the area, free from the capitalist system. The State is denying this, declaring it a “no rights zone.”



Finally, urbanization is probably the last step of industrial civilization based on the exploitation of nature. Beyond climate change, scientists from different disciplines agree that a process of collapsing ecosystems and civilization is in march, threatening entire species. The end of fossil-based energy and the scarcity of resources that are currently essential to maintain the urbanized way of life of an increasing number of human beings has put the natural, economic, political and social balance at serious stake. As Pablo Servigne writes, “It’s true that the possibility of collapse closes futures that are valuable for us, and this is violent, but it opens some futures that could be really happy. What’s at stake is to approach these new futures and make them livable.”[14]



In that context, from the perspectives of both the right to the city and of social ecology, citifying the rural and reaching harmony between the first and second natures, building autonomous communities with a real possibility of creating a face-to-face democracy, and preparing ourselves for the inevitable end of the collapse of the capitalist system is probably the kind of permanent insurrection that we have to make real.

References





Barcelona en comu 2014. Why do we want to win back Barcelona, 2014. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from: https://guanyembarcelona.cat/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/priciples.pdf.



Bookchin, M. 1992. Urbanization against Cities. Montreal: Black Rose Books. Farha, L. 2017. Report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to nondiscrimination in this context A/HRC/34/51. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from: http://ap.ohchr.org/documents/alldocs.aspx?doc_id=27600 Harvey, D. 2011. Le Capitalisme contre le Droit a la ville. Neoliberalisme, urbanization et resistances. Amsterdam: Editions Amsterdam.



Lefebvre, H. 1967. Le Droit a la Ville. Economica.



OXFAM 2018. Reward work, not wealth. To end the inequality crisis, we must build an economy for ordinary working people, not the rich and powerfu. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from: https://www-



cdn.oxfam.org/s3fs-public/file_attachments/bp-reward-work-not-wealth-220118-en.pdf



Polis Institute 2015. The City Statute, New Tool for ensuring right to the city in Brazil’. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from:



http://www.polis.org.br/uploads/916/916.pdf. Servigne, P. and Stevens, R. 2015. Comment tout peut s’effondrer: Petit manuel de collapsologie a l’usage des generations presentes. Paris: Seuil.



Revol, C. 2017, Le Droit a la ville, Quelques eclairages sur le texte et l’auteur, in Le Droit a la ville, Cahier des 2®mes rencontres de geopolitique critique, sous la direction de Claske Dijkema et Morgane Cohen, Mars.



Sassen, S. 2016. Expulsions. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Subirats, J. 2018. Les villes au creur de la redistribution? Le nouveau municipalisme, antidote a l’Europe de l’austerite et des Etats dans l’impasse. Mouvements, 2(94), pp.11–23.



Charter for the Right to the City of the city of Mexico 2010. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from: http://www.hic-



gs.org/content/Mexico_Charter_R2C_2010.pdf



UCLG 2011. Global Charter Agenda for Human Rights in the City. [Online].



[Accessed 19 August 2019]. Available from: https://www.uclg-



cisdp.org/en/right-to-the-city/world-charter-agenda



World Charter for the Right to the City 2005. [Online]. [Accessed 19



August 2019]. Available from: http://hic-gs.org/document.php?pid=2422



UN World Cities Report 2016. [Online]. [Accessed 19 August 2019].
Available from: http://wcr.unhabitat.org/main-report/



Notes:
Moving Beyond the Right to the City: Urban Commoning in Greece



Theodoros Karyotis



The urban space is the epicenter of social antagonism. At any historical moment, it represents a crystallization of power relations. While political and economic powers incessantly reform it to better isolate, control and exploit its inhabitants, the latter inevitably seek empowerment through collective mobilization. After all, this is the space in which people see their social lives unfold, where they form family and community bonds, where they seek self-realization. Resistance, then, is not the prerogative of radicals or the underprivileged. Most city dwellers are called to confront the neoliberal carving up of urban space if they are to lead fulfilling lives in ecologically sound surroundings.



It is not a coincidence, then, that modern social struggles erupt as urban phenomena with a strong spatial component. While some people may lament the concurrent demise of the workers’ movement, it could be argued that the workplace is but one—albeit crucial—of the domains in which capital exploits human labor. The city is common wealth created by the collective efforts of generations; capitalism tries to appropriate this wealth, turning the city into a terrain of accumulation. Capitalization of human energies has expanded to all spheres of social life. Processes of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2009) are underway in most urban contexts: land grabbing, gentrification, privatization of shared space, cultural appropriation, commodification of basic human needs such as housing, food, water and healthcare, evictions and displacement, not to mention increasing racism, militarization and surveillance. Accordingly, the circulation of struggles extends to all fields of life where capital imposes its logic. Many thinkers have tried to conceptualize this shift by examining the relationship between capitalism, urbanism and ecology.[15]



City dwellers may define their desire for full participation in the city’s socio-political life as a right to the city to be reclaimed against authorities, or they may dove right in and self-manage the urban space as a commons, or they may do both. In turn, these urban struggles—along with the frameworks used to make sense of them—will constitute them as collective subjects.



These are, then, some of the issues this text seeks to raise, exemplified in the context of Greek urban struggles over the past decade.

The Right to the City



Since its inception by philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the 1960s, the discourse of the right to the city has pervaded struggles against urban exclusion, commodification and privatization. Even when Lefebvre is not
overtly referenced, an intuitive grasp of the right to the city underlies many discussions and conflicts over what kind of cities we desire.



Lefebvre’s take on the right to the city was a radical one. He never conceived the right to the city simply as a legal notion, a juridical defense of specific human needs. Rather, he envisioned an active subject that would enact and materialize those rights, rather than merely demand their implementation. Being a Marxist, he identified this collective subject as the working class (Lefebvre 1996a:154). Not the uniform, industrial working class of the Marxian oeuvre, consolidated in the capitalist workplace, but “a very different kind of class formation—fragmented and divided, multiple in its aims and needs, more often itinerant, disorganized and fluid rather than solidly implanted” (Harvey 2012: xiii). That is to say, a class formed around the everyday production and reproduction of life in the urban space.



As Harvey (ibid: xvi) suggests, the task of this collective subject would be “to imagine and reconstitute a totally different kind of city out of the disgusting mess of a globalizing, urbanizing capital run amok.” Under this light, the idea of a right to the city becomes genuinely revolutionary, as the question of what kind of city we desire cannot be separated from questions of what kind of social relations, what kind of political organization or what kind of relationship with nature we desire.



Lefebvre’s “right to the city” is not reducible to access of individual citizens to urban resources (housing, public spaces, services, facilities, etc.); rather, he envisioned the city as managed by its very inhabitants. The radical edge of Lefebvre’s right to the city lies precisely in the implicit conflict between the right to the use value of the city against the right to its exchange value. In other words, it is a concept that empowers the users of the city against the proprietors of the city, who are in most cases not the same people.



Lefebvre’s aim was to rework Marx’s idea of revolutionary change by expanding and enriching the collective subject of this change, and moving the locus of revolution from the capitalist workplace to the field of everyday life. Marx and Marxists, however, had notoriously rejected the notion of “rights” as a limited concept that was too intimately tied to capitalist liberalism to be of any use for revolution. Why, then, did Lefebvre employ this concept in his attempt to refashion revolutionary action? It is important to note that Lefebvre was writing in the late 1960s, when doctrinaire Marxism was coming under fire from many directions. In the following years, many Marxists renounced Bolshevism as totalizing and authoritarian, and some even sought refuge in liberalism. By the late 1970s, revolutionary politics was in decline, and the discourse of “human rights” had become dominant in progressive circles as a supposedly “apolitical” mechanism of ensuring for populations a minimum of protection from exclusion and domination, in the absence of a meaningful plan of
profound structural change (McLoughlin 2016). The ensuing collapse of the Soviet bloc and the ideological prevalence of capitalism and liberal democracy only served to consolidate “rights talk” as the horizon of progressive politics. Lefebvre’s, then, was one of many attempts at navigating that adverse conjuncture without renouncing the prospect of revolutionary change.



However, the “rights” discourse does not come without its complications. With the resurgence of radical thought in the 1990s and 2000s, the concept of rights was overwhelmingly criticized by post-Marxist and radical thinkers as part and parcel of a post-political consensus in which political spaces are closing, giving way to technocratic solutions to social conflicts and demands (ibid.). Most notably, Giorgio Agamben (1998: 126—135) criticized human rights as a concept by which state sovereignty extends to nonpolitical forms of life. In this respect, rights legitimize state intervention rather than limiting it. Moreover, since the concept of rights rests on a distinction between the political and the social sphere, it aids in the de-politicization of subjects. As De Souza Santos (2014) argues, a “majority of the world’s inhabitants are not the subjects of human rights [but] rather the objects of human rights discourses.”



Often, “the right to the city” takes the form of a mini-charter of human rights—that is to say, a list of “commitments” of municipal authorities towards residents, who are entitled to social and economic goods. While there is great “propaganda value and mobilizing potential” in such tactics, in that accusing political opponents of “violating rights” is a powerful rhetorical device (Bond 2018), the mere invocation of “commitments” of authorities towards citizens may lend itself to assistencialist policies. These have been historically shown to perpetuate inequality, as they tend to disempower rights holders in front of rights-granting bodies by treating them as passive recipients instead of active subjects (Freire 2005: 12).



Undoubtedly, rights can be—and have been—used as a bulwark against exploitation and exclusion. However, when social needs are expressed in legalese and enter the juridical sphere, they come to form part of a legal system where they are always subordinate to other legal concepts and other rights. That is to say, when the “social need as a right” is not anymore an instrument of struggle but a commitment of a liberal democracy towards its subjects, it becomes part of a hierarchy of rights, on the top of which lies the right to property. Often, the sanctity of the rule of law is little more than a fig leaf to conceal systematic exploitation and plunder (Mattei and Nader 2008). The experience of South Africa (Bond 2018) seems to confirm that courts systematically fail to enforce officially sanctioned rights to the city when they clash with entrenched interests and property rights. A similar situation was experienced in Greece, under the state of exception imposed by austerity policies.



It comes as no surprise, then, that the right to the city has been adopted wholeheartedly by a host of organizations, from local NGOs to UNHabitat, that not only lack an anti-capitalist orientation but are even an accessory to neoliberal expansion (Souza 2010). The right to the city, in this sense, loses Lefebvre’s radical edge and is interpreted as the right of individual citizens/consumers to a better urban life in the context of liberal democracy. At best, it is translated into rights of citizen input—so-called “participation”—in consultations with predefined agendas. At worst, it is used as a pretext for urban segregation policies, as when the authorities repress marginalized populations and exclude them from public space in the name of the citizen’s “right to a cleaner and safer environment.”



“The right to the city,” writes Harvey (2012: xv), “is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning.” However, the question we have to ask here is whether this is simply yet another case of successful appropriation and reabsorption of a radical discourse into dominant capitalist practices, or whether the concept of “rights,” by resting on a distinction between rights-holders and rights-granters, is inherently disempowering. Of course, whether movements opt for restoring Lefebvre’s revolutionary content of the right to the city or for moving beyond it should be entirely up to them. In any case, being aware of the limits and pitfalls of “rights-talk” is essential.

The Urban Commons



In recent years we observe the emergence of a new explanatory framework, that of the commons. The movement of the urban commons has forcefully entered the global spotlight, especially through the practice of occupation of common space (Tsavdaroglou 2016).



The concept of the commons was popularized by the institutional school of Elinor Ostrom, who studied hundreds of communities forming around natural resources (fisheries, irrigation systems, forests, etc.) to self-regulate extraction and thus prevent the infamous “tragedy of the commons,” i.e. the depletion of the resource (Ostrom 2015). While critical of Ostrom’s resource-centrism, autonomist Marxist thinkers[16] have taken up the commons discourse, as it allows them to describe empowered communities of struggle that are self-instituted to defend themselves against processes of dispossession, commodification and exclusion.



The commons is an eminently political concept, as its definition includes not only a common “resource,” which may be natural (e.g. water) or immaterial (e.g. knowledge or any aspect of social life), but also an active community that organizes horizontally and decides upon a set of rules of coexistence. A commons, then, consists necessarily of an active community self-instituted around a shared “resource.” This political dimension has made the commons a prominent discourse in explaining the activity of the
urban social movements of the last decade.[17] Rather than relying on traditional tactics of agitprop or forming around concrete identities or demands, urban social movements in recent years tend to erupt as reappropriations of public space by horizontal collectives. Participants in the 2011 wave of protest around the world occupied public squares to form impromptu settlements with their own collectively-run facilities and assembleary decision-making processes. The “square commons” did not dissipate after the protest ended but became the blueprint for the creation of antagonistic social structures to promote popular self-sufficiency and resilience, fueled by the conviction that capitalism is unable to ensure the reproduction of societies and the planet itself. In recent years, movements have a growing propensity to view the urban space as a commons and to propose solutions to social ills that favor collective forms of ownership, direct participation and self-management, thus questioning existing forms of integration in city life.



Of course, the discourse of the commons is not immune to appropriation. Critics point out that the idea of the commons is appealing to organizations that promote neoliberal globalization, as the social selfinitiative is compatible with the neoliberal renunciation of state welfare provision, which leaves society to fend for itself. Moreover, commons thinkers have repeatedly warned against “distorted” (De Angelis 2009) or “pro-capitalist” (Caffentzis 2010) commons, which serve to promote the circulation of capital.



However, appropriation by capital is not the only problem the commons faces. What is the degree of openness required of each commons to maintain its character without becoming exclusionary? How are effective commons practices at the city level transferred to the management of more complex systems, such as entire bio-regions? How can the commons become materially self-sustaining without creating dependencies on the capitalist market? What are the effective structures through which different commons can coordinate their actions towards common goals? These issues—access, scalability, viability and coordination—are central in the discussion over the commons. The commons, therefore, should not be viewed as a set of structures or processes, but rather as a disposition of a number of people to define themselves as a group, question their existing circumstances, identify their collective and individual needs, and negotiate their rules of coexistence through mutual respect and recognition. That is to say, the commons become politics par excellence.



In any case, my intention here is not to explore the potential of the commons in tracing socio-political alternatives to capitalism, since I have done this elsewhere (Karyotis 2018). Here I approach the commons as a discourse to make sense of, but also shape, urban struggles. The assumption of initiative by organized society rarely means the renunciation of
negotiated rights to healthcare, education, welfare or basic services. The commons is not an alternative to “rights talk,” but rather a way in which rights may be fleshed out, and tethered to contentious politics waged by concrete communities.



In this light, the right to the city and the urban commons are not mutually exclusive strategies of contestation but rather two different vocabularies, two different “grammars of human dignity”(De Sousa Santos 2014), for making sense of urban struggles. The combined use of both discourses brings to mind what Harvey (2012: 87), describes as a “double-pronged political attack, through which the state is forced to supply more and more in the way of public goods for public purposes, along with the self-organization of whole populations to appropriate, use, and supplement those goods in ways that extend and enhance the qualities of the non-commodified reproductive and environmental commons.”



Yet, the two vocabularies give rise to different conceptualizations of social conflict, different tactics and objectives, and ultimately different antagonistic subjects. While it is very common for movements to engage in both rights talk and commons talk, the coexistence of the two discourses is not always as harmonious as Harvey would have us believe. The interplay between the two discourses will be made explicit in the ensuing analysis of resistance against austerity policies in contemporary Greece.

Urban Struggles in Greece



Developments in Greece exemplify the concept of accumulation by dispossession, and specifically the tactic of austerity as an instrument of wealth extraction and upwards redistribution. Austerity is a recipe systematically being prescribed to ailing economies. It is ostensibly intended to do away with sovereign debt by reducing public expenditure, selling off public assets, raising taxes and slashing labor rights, welfare provision and public-sector jobs. In effect, it represents a radical reshuffling of the cards at the expense of the lower and middle classes.



Other than the fact that for the first time such an ambitious structural adjustment program has been implemented in a “developed” country, the case of Greece is nothing new as far as austerity and counter-austerity tactics go. I have, therefore, repeatedly argued that the idea of Greek exceptionalism—both in its “corrupt and lazy” version and in its “heroic and revolutionary” version—is an orientalist fallacy. Nevertheless, it is true that the violent shakeup of day-to-day normality destabilized established identities and thus pushed great parts of the population to a state of liminality (Varvarousis and Kallis 2017; Varvarousis 2018). Liminality is an anthropological concept that denotes an intermediate stage in a transition (between life stages, between groups or between seasons), where subjects have shed their previous identities but have not yet assumed new ones. This
state of uncertainty and fluidity has certainly given rise to resignation, depression or regression to reactionary identities, but it has also created creative resistances and admirable experiments in social self-organization.



To understand modern urban struggles in Greece, we have to look into the history of the urban space. Greek cities were built overnight. In the 1950s, rural populations started to urbanize. In the 1960s and 1970s, constructors took advantage of lax planning laws—drafted by their political patrons—to create densely populated high-rise cities without any provision for public space and infrastructure (Makrygianni and Tsavdaroglou 2011). That was the initial process of enclosure that eroded traditional communities, commodified housing, and promoted a peculiar sense of isolation among the crowd of others. A manifest absence of public facilities, open spaces, and community centers characterizes Greek cities to this day.



In the 1990s and 2000s, the prevalent social imaginary was one of individual social mobility and consumerism. The debt-fueled affluence drove the newly-formed middle classes away from inner-city neighborhoods, which were occupied by working class migrants and natives. Throughout this era, urban renewal projects were underway, culminating in a construction frenzy leading up to the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.



In December 2008, the murder of a teenager by the police sparked the first wave of struggles to reclaim the urban space on the part of students, immigrants and the disenfranchized urban youth. The protests served to shed light on the urban alienation, exploitation and exclusion hidden behind the veil of ostensible prosperity. Participants in the protests were fuzed in an anonymous collective subject that actively transformed the city through decentralized acts of re-appropriation of urban space: public building occupations, barricades, marches, spontaneous artistic events, disruption of traffic and commerce. Interestingly, there was a complete absence of formal demands; protesters were not struggling for rights or reforms, but were actively projecting their collective aspirations onto the urban space.



That collective “scream”[18] was a wake-up call for a dormant and complacent society, and has left a legacy of social cooperation and a redefined public sphere. Thousands of collectives were born, ranging from political groups to art ensembles to grassroots trade unions. A whole new generation of youth was schooled in horizontalism, solidarity and direct action tactics, and new spatial practices were adopted by social movements, culminating in the propagation of self-managed squats and social centers.



Navarinou Park is part of “December’s” legacy. Only a few months after the revolt, an abandoned urban parking lot was occupied by neighbors and collectives in Exarcheia; the asphalt was dug up, trees and flowers were planted, paths were laid out, benches were installed. The park has since been self-managed by an open assembly and has been the site of political,
cultural and social events. Despite attempts at eviction, the park retains its character to this day. Even if the vocabulary of the commons was not widespread at that moment, we have an early instance of the substitution of “public” space with “common” space; of rigid, aseptic space that serves as a neutral ground between isolated individuals with organic space where individuals can connect and intertwine their desires in the context of community, where they can negotiate the terms of their co-existence. This kind of urban commoning would go on to become a blueprint for urban struggles in the following years.



The debt crisis that broke out in 2010 and the concomitant structural adjustment served to intensify social antagonism and exacerbate conflicts over urban space. A defining moment for grassroots spatial practices and organizational forms was the 2011 “movement of the squares.” A multitude of individuals with different origins and agendas participated in the mobilizations. This diversity was certainly an advantage as it enabled osmosis between different groups and individuals and the emergence of innovative practices. While there was extensive rights talk, since the austerity program was perceived as a rupture of the social contract that threatened social, labor and human rights, the squares themselves were organized as urban commons, with a self-instituted community grouping around the occupied common space. Probably, they can be considered an instance of “liminal commons” (Varvarousis 2018), as the encampments were fluid institutions populated by destabilized identities; the aim of the squares was not long-term resilience as per Ostrom, but experimentation with new spatial practices that could lead to a multiplication of struggles.



Indeed, in the wake of the squares, a multitude of urban commons emerged. It was no longer just youthful protesters who occupied public spaces to turn them into commons, but mixed collectives of young and old, men and women, families and individuals, immigrants and natives. Two examples of such commons were the urban farming at PERKA (“Periurban Farming”) on the grounds of an abandoned military base in Thessaloniki and the Self-Managed Urban Gardens of Elliniko in Athens, on the site of the former Athens airport. Both sites were earmarked to be privatized and developed into luxury housing and commercial infrastructure. In both cases, instead of demanding that their right of access to urban space was respected, citizens’ movements self-enacted this right through commoning.



This “performative”—rather than juridical—reclamation of rights through urban commoning became widespread. The state of exception brought about by the crisis meant that most rights of the population were subordinated to the task of “salvation” of the country from debt. Regressive legislation was passed, existing juridical guarantees of human rights remained unenforced, and courts ruled consistently against those trying to judicially
defend common wealth against appropriation and privatization. The urgency of the situation made the abstract invocation of rights seem futile and called for direct, often extra-legal, action.



Local community self-defense initiatives multiplied when the government imposed an indiscriminate land ownership tax—mockingly called haratsi for its reminiscence of a despised Ottoman poll tax—arbitrarily charged through the electricity bill. Homeowners who failed to pay had their power cut; meanwhile, wages had been slashed, and one-third of the workforce was out of a job. This extortionate measure would have created a situation verging on humanitarian catastrophe were it not for the selforganised anti-haratsi neighborhood committees, which were on call to extra-legally reconnect the power for families that could not afford the tax.



Food provision was another critical area of self-defense. In the previous decade, oligopolistic, price-fixing intermediaries had come to dominate food distribution, making everyday staples unaffordable for the popular classes, while squeezing the livelihood of farmers. The movement to cut out the middlemen started with truckloads of potatoes arriving in central city squares to be sold directly to end consumers. The potato movement soon evolved into a decentralized guerrilla farmers’ market movement, which occupied urban land without permits, trying to bring together farmers and consumers despite the threat of eviction, arrests and confrontation with entrenched interests.



The creation of urban commons extended to other rights: the right to healthcare, with the creation of an extended network of self-managed solidarity clinics; the right to a livelihood, with the establishment of alternative currencies[19] and a multitude of egalitarian workers’ cooperatives; or the right to affordable food, through the operation of consumer cooperatives[20] and solidarity kitchens.



However, the coexistence of the rights discourse and the commons discourse has not always been peaceful. A case in point was the movement against water privatization. Under the terms of a memorandum, the water company of Thessaloniki—among others—was due to be privatized. Small citizens’ initiatives organized an opposition to privatization by effectively mobilizing civil society. Within the anti-privatization block, those conceiving water as a right defended state management of the water company; those conceiving water as a commons promoted an alternative model of social ownership based on self-management and citizens’ participation.[21] Due to diverging conceptualizations and tactics, the rift developed into a bitter ideological conflict. This was reflected in practical issues, as the first group favored centralized leadership through a committee composed of politicians and trade unionists—unsurprisingly aligned with the Syriza party, which was expected to win the upcoming elections—while the second group favored assembleary and participatory organizing processes. Despite the inner schism,
Thessaloniki’s water movement mobilized thousands of volunteers to organize an unofficial referendum, in which 97 per cent of the 220,000 citizens who voted rejected the privatization. A fragile and defeated right-wing government was obliged to put the privatization on hold, until the next government (led by Syriza) brought the privatization back on the table a few years later.



Another field where an unexamined right to the city discourse may prove counter-productive is the organization of visibility events such as the Gay Pride March. To be sure, in a country as pious as Greece, the importance of pride marches in reclaiming public space for the full spectrum of identities and practices cannot be overstated; in effect, such events regularly become sites of confrontation with the Orthodox Church and the extreme right. Such events, however, face an additional risk. To the extent that they promote an individualistic conception of the right to the city and fail to adopt an intersectional view of social oppression, they may involuntarily turn themselves into niche markets in the context of urban renewal, under which diversity is prized as long as the overriding social principle remains that of market exchange. Indeed, diversity, creativity and innovation are core concepts of gentrification processes underway in European cities. These exclusionary processes presuppose an individualized recipient of rights, rather than active collectives that affirm their right to self-determine everyday life in the city.



To address the growing commercialization and co-optation of Gay Pride Marches (see also Ashley Wong 2018; No justice no pride 2018), Radical Pride,[22] an “alternative” gay pride event that safeguards its autonomy from public institutions and corporate sponsors, takes place yearly in Thessaloniki since 2017. Radical Pride offers a rich framework to understand how gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or ability intersect in the production of oppression and exclusion. It thus seeks to affirm collective action and connect the struggle of the LGBTQ movement with other urban struggles.

The Subject of Social Mobilization



Social change is not just about the transformation of political and economic structures. Most importantly, it is about the transformation of subjects, of humans as social agents. The smooth operation of capitalism presupposes a specific anthropological type—mockingly dubbed homo economicus by critics—and thus the dominant structures of education, family, the mass media, public discourse etc. are geared towards the creation of this mindset. Accordingly, social struggles aim to create subjects of change, an anthropological type that questions dominant values to become the social agents of a future liberated society.



Struggles are constituted precisely as formative experiences that can bring about such subjectifications. The liberated subject is not only a prerequisite of contestation, but also a product of it, in a dialectic movement. Often, sectarian leftists and anarchists disregard the transformative potential of struggle per se, and thus tend to dismiss diverse and multitudinous mobilizations, such as the squares movement, as “interclass,” “reformist,” etc. Of course, we cannot deny that the occupied squares have been as much spaces of divergence as they have been of convergence (Simiti 2015). In any case, social mobilization should not be viewed as a closed club reserved only for the initiated, but rather as a contradictory breeding ground for militant subjectivities.



Indeed, in the liminal period of destabilization in Greece previous individualistic identities based on consumption, economic rationality, and social mobility were dissolved at a grand scale, giving rise to precarious and transitory collective identities geared towards social change.



A certain degree of abstraction is inevitable when trying to imagine this new subject that will spring from a process of destabilization to wage the struggle for social justice. Different conceptions of the collective subject have been proposed as part of different liberatory projects: the working class as the unitary subject of Marxian class struggle; the proletariat as a nonidentity, as a class against itself (Holloway 2009; Nasioka 2018); the multitude as a diverse, contradictory, fragmented class of everyone who contributes to the material, affective and cultural reproduction of society under the rule of capital (Hardt and Negri 2004); the citizen as an inclusive territorial identity of those who jointly manage their common affairs in a face-to-face democracy (Bookchin 1999, 2002); and the people as a common identity constructed out of a plurality of demands in the context of a hegemonic project to capture the State (Laclau 2005).



Even if they are nothing more than strategic abstractions in the context of specific schemes of social transformation, all of the above conceptualizations of the collective subject have had their day in the tumultuous years of crisis in Greece. Each of the above abstractions presents specific challenges and problems. Analyzing the ramifications of each conception is beyond the scope of the present text; what is of interest is that each presents a different relation of the subject with the political sphere, and thus a different avenue of socio-political transformation. Some envision the abolition of the distinction between the political and the social sphere, either through the implosion of the political or through its expansion to include all areas of life. Others wish to maintain the distinction but offer a fuller definition of the political by bringing disempowered identities to the forefront.



Similarly, the urban commons and the right to the city as two discourses that try to shape urban struggles lead to contrasting conceptions of the political.
While both are prone to be appropriated by capitalist forces, the former stresses the formation of a political community, while the latter emphasizes certain commitments of the authorities. Hence, while the former favors autonomous political organization, the latter tends to call for top-down and state-centric solutions to social ills.



The above conclusion does not imply that social movements should cease demanding the enforcement of negotiated rights and the expansion of legally recognized rights. After all, “rights” is the way by which social conquests of the past—for inclusion, against exploitation, domination, racism or sexism—have been consecrated in the legal system and given juridical substance and continuity in the context of the State. Rights are thus a progressive force that is here to stay, and the demand for legal reforms that safeguard the commons is an indispensable aspect of urban struggles.[23]



Rather, in this text I have tried to point out that when a technical juridical conception of rights becomes the centerpiece and horizon of progressive politics, the discourse of rights tends to ratify existing systems of domination by subordinating lived, contentious politics to impersonal juridical constructs, thus legitimizing state power rather than curbing it. Despite their weaknesses and ambiguities, commoning practices serve to empower subjects and revitalize democratic practice beyond the confines of liberal parliamentary democracy.

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Notes
Reconceptualizing the Right to the City and Spatial Justice Through Social Ecology



Federico Venturini

Introduction: Critically Exploring the Right to the City



The aim of this work is to discuss the right to the city, spatial justice and social ecology in order to create new tools and understandings at the service of urban social movements aiming towards ecological and democratic cities.[24]



This work is divided in five sections. In the first and second sections the concepts of the right[25] to the city and spatial justice are introduced, while the third highlights a convergence between the two concepts. In the fourth, social ecology is used in order to explore key concepts such as citizenship, justice and freedom. Building on the previous section, in the fifth the right to the city and spatial justice are finally reconceptualised through social ecology. The main aim of this work, in light of the holistic social change approach, is to reframe the concepts of the right to the city and spatial justice in order to strengthen them and make them more complete.



Since Lefebvre introduced the concept in 1968, the right to the city has been used by different actors for different agendas. In this chapter, however, I focus on the academic and political discussions around the right to the city, avoiding those debates with more institutionalized formulations of the concept. The political philosophy of the right to the city shares many common traits with social ecology, starting with the centrality of the city in discussions of the urban crisis.



Attoh (2011: 670) explores the broadness and difficulty of precisely defining the right to the city: the concept is still “vague and radically open” and this makes it possible for different actors to use it for different purposes. For Lefebvre, the right to the city is “like a cry and a demand” (1996: 158). At the same time, it is a necessity to surpass current inequalities and fulfill basic needs, and an aspiration for change (Marcuse 2012).



However, Lefebvre never fully defined the term (Souza 2010; Attoh 2011). In one of the more articulated expressions he says that “the right to the city, complemented by the right to difference and the right to information, should modify, concretize and make more practical the rights of the citizen as a urban dweller (cidatin) and user of multiple services” (Lefebvre 1996: 34). The right to the city is the right to full and equal enjoyment of the resources and services concentrated in cities, something that would only be fully possible in another, non-capitalist society (Souza 2012b). Lefebvre underlines that the right to the city moves towards a “transformed and renewed right to urban life” (Lefebvre 1996: 158), defined as the possibility for people to shape their own city, where the concept of “autogestion” (self-management) is crucial. In Lefebvre’s work
there is a critique of state power that also resonates with the social ecology approach to direct action. Today state policies are blocking the building of a city shaped on citizenship: “The incompatibility between the state and the urban is radical in nature. The state can only prevent the urban from taking shape” (Lefebvre 2003: 180). This effect of the State is rooted in its nature, which “has to control the urban phenomenon...to retard its development, to push it in the direction of institutions that extend to society as a whole, through exchange and the market” (Lefebvre 2003: 180). Self-management is thus crucial. Harvey stresses that the right to the city is “the freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves” (Harvey 2008: 23), putting the emphasis on the collective aspect of this right. From a Marxist perspective, the right to the city helps in understanding “the necessary connection between urbanization and surplus production and use” (Harvey 2008: 40). The call for a “real” right to the city comes from the oppressed. As Marcuse (2012: 32) points out, from an economic point of view it comes from the “most marginalized and the most underpaid and insecure members of the working class” and from a cultural expression it comes from the directly oppressed and alienated. It is thus a unifying call for all who have not.



With this radical (and matching the original Lefebvrian formulation) interpretation of the right to the city, urban social movements around the world have started to claim the idea in order to gain access to needs and services and to re-shape the city (Hamel, Lustiger-Thaler and Mayer 2000). At the same time, they have gained strength from it. As Soja (2010: 109) affirms, the right to the city “can help to unite diverse and particularized struggle into larger and more powerful movements.” Indeed, as Harvey and Potter (2009: 48) point out, the right to the city is a process, continuously shaped by our desire and new challenges and built around “social solidarities.” In this, urban social movements play a crucial role, affirming the right to the city in different spatial and social forms:





The inalienable right to the city rests upon the capacity to force open spaces of the city to protest and contention, to create unmediated public spaces, so that the cauldron of urban life can become a catalytic site from which new conceptions and configurations of urban living can be devised and out of which new and less damaging conceptions of rights can be constructed. (Harvey and Potter 2009: 49)





Thus, in this radical interpretation, the right to the city is a protest call to enable the opening of new social paths towards a better kind of urban living.



However, NGOs, international bodies, and municipal authorities all around the globe have assumed a different perspective on the right to the city. Activist-scholar D’Souza (2016: 7) pointed out “the rights discourse
today is a cacophony of discordant voices.” This plurality of actors and institutions invoke the notion of rights, yet adopt different ideological orientations that suit other agendas. For example, Kuymulu (2013: 93) found that “UN agencies have not only attempted to co-opt the content of the notion as established by the existing right to the city movements, but have also attempted to rewrite the history of this concept.” One of the main activities of NGOs, international bodies and city authorities—under the slogan of the right to the city—is thus based around the development and implementation of charters of the right to the city. As Mayer (2012; 2013) points out, this approach presents several issues: (1) it excludes what is not in the list; (2) in contrast to the class reference of the Lefebvrian right to the city, it does not acknowledge class and power divisions; and (3) “the demands for rights as enumerated merely target particular aspects of neoliberal policy” (2012: pp. 74—75), watering down the radical call to transform the city.



Souza (2010: 317) holds a similar position, asserting that the right to the city for NGOs and official agencies (as well for some social movements) can be summarized as “the right to a better, more ‘human’ life in the context of the capitalist city, the capitalist society and on the basis of a (‘reformed’ and ‘improved’) representative ‘democracy’,” with the aim of fixing the current political and economic system, not challenging it.

Critically Exploring Spatial Justice



Spatial justice is another key concept for current urban social movements. Justice is a concept that has been always invoked by social movements, especially from the spatial perspective. For example the following quote, referring to an American city, dramatically captures the experience of the urban poor:





People in the ghetto know perfectly well it is different in other neighborhoods that are whiter and wealthier. They know that this is not accidental. They might be fuzzy on the history and the exact actors, and might even have bought into the sizable efforts to blame the poor for their own poverty, but the culpability of banks, city officials, employers, corporations and absentee landlords is widely, if rather intuitively, understood. Which means that people understand that they live in a space that is socially produced, and could even tell you how that works though they would never articulate it using this kind of language. (Gibbon 2010: 619)





The poor have a clear understanding of the spatial dimension of inequalities, calling for the end of them, and for justice.



The Western concept of justice originated in ancient Greece and is strongly linked to the formation of citizenship and direct democracy in
ancient Athens (Soja 2010: 75). With the creation of the Nation-State, the idea of justice has been conceptualized as provided by the State, but not as part of the concept of citizenship. However, justice cannot only be linked to the kind of justice administered by the State. It assumes a broader meaning of just or fair, linked to “the qualities of a just society: freedom, liberty, equality, democracy, [and] civil rights” (Soja 2010: 20). For Soja (2010), justice is a concept that should go beyond class, race, and gender. Justice and injustice, as concepts, pervade our world on multiple levels and are deeply nested in the current socioeconomic system, but they can be challenged and changed through social and political action (Soja 2010). As Harvey recognizes, economic inequality and injustice are both a production of capitalist urban development:





Capital represents itself in the form of a physical landscape created in its own image, created as use values to enhance the progressive accumulation of capital. The geographical landscape which results is the crowning glory of past capitalist development. (1985: 25)





Subsequently, Soja (2010) also recognized the importance of looking at the spatial dimension of justice and developed “spatial justice” as a core concept. Even without negating the importance of the historical and sociological approaches of justice, focusing on the spatial helps highlight hidden aspects or discover new perspectives for action. In a recent discussion on spatial justice, Iveson (2011: 255) affirms that “the attention to space can help highlight the spatial relations in which place-based issues and actors are enmeshed.”



Spatial justice, as a concept used in analyzing current urban crises, can firstly help cast “new light on the processes through which socio-spatial injustice is reproduced, perpetuated and sometimes aggravated in our times” (Souza 2011: 73). Thus, focusing on the negation of spatial justice can be a powerful tool, both helping to understand how injustice is created and highlighting where to act.



Secondly, a focus on the affirmation of spatial justice can help reveal “the spatial practices by means of which protagonists of socio-spatial change (above all emancipative social movements) are challenging injustice and trying to build alternatives” (ibid). As with the right to the city, spatial justice becomes an agenda for urban social movements to follow in order to reshape the city. A connection can be made between the two concepts, as I will show in the next section.

A Convergence of Concepts



The concepts of right to the city and spatial justice can both be used as analytical tools to highlight current urban crises and as proactive slogans
upon which to build social struggles. Looking at the intersection between the creation of space, the negation of rights, and social injustice is crucial to understanding the urban crisis and developing strategies for social change.



In this section I argue that there is a further connection that needs to be made between the right to the city and spatial justice. As Uitermark (2012) considers, a just city presupposes equity, distribution of resources and democratic control toward the full implementation of the right to the city. The right to the city and spatial justice thus work hand-in-hand towards the construction of a just city. This link is very clear, for example, when Zarate (2015) titles an essay The Cities We Want: Right to the City and Social Justice for All. In the same vein, Marcuse (2012: 35) stresses that the right to the city is not a mere set of individual rights but connected to the idea of justice: “The right to the city is a moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice.” The concept of rights and justice refer to a similar moral stand. Moreover, “a good [and just] city should not be simply a city with distributional equity, but one that supports the full development of each individual and of all individuals” (Marcuse 2009: 2).



In their positive affirmation, both spatial justice and the right to the city are demanding fulfillment for humans in the urban environment. In their negation they are also deeply connected: spatial injustice is the negation of the right to the city (and vice versa). Moreover, they are determined or negated under the same political frame: “Urban rights and justice are therefore mediated by the spatial organization of political powers” (Harvey and Potter 2009: 42). It is thus clear that the two concepts of right to the city and spatial justice are strictly interdependent and intertwined (Mitchell 2003)—one needs the other for its full positive realization. Both concepts go beyond class, race, and gender, and should be able to mobilize a large part of the population (Harvey 2003; Soja 2010). Furthermore, they both refer to the need to create a true citizenship. However, the concept of citizenship is a “multifaceted idea” (Souza 1999: 171) theorized by various authors and traditions, depending on specific national and juridical contexts. Often, innovations have been implemented under pressure from urban social movements, as stressed by Holston: “The right to the city arguments of the urban social movements embodied the struggle of residents for this recognition of being citizens who bear the right to rights” (2008: 241). Citizenship is conceived as a distinction between those who may access rights in their daily life in the city and those who cannot. There is a continuous struggle for expanding the concept of citizenship and recognizing the rights of everyone, especially the oppressed.



Lefebvre explicitly said that a true right to the city “implies nothing less than a revolutionary conception of citizenship” (in Merrifield 2017: 23). From this perspective, urban social movements have actively built an insurgent citizenship (Holston 1998; 2008), a citizenship that attempts to
subvert state agendas and enact real forms of citizenships based on “civil, political, and social rights available to people” (Holston 1998: 50), beyond formal forms of citizenships granted (and restricted) by the State. Insurgent citizenship is critical here and its objective is the disruption of granted norms and a transformation of the city (Holston 1998).



However, despite the normalized use of the concept of citizenship in society, contemporary urban social movements remain skeptical about using this concept as it indicates “distance, anonymity, and uncommon ground” (Holston 2009: 250). Citizenship is commonly used by institutional frameworks that do not easily allow for revolutionary usage. Furthermore, citizenship, in all its expression, is based on who is a citizen and who is not— as determined by the Nation-State (Sassen 2002). In this way urban social movements continuously struggle with public officials, but also with the public, to enlarge the base of citizenship.



Moreover, the concept of the right to the city has also been co-opted and distorted (Souza 2010; Kuymulu 2013). One example is the drafting of the Brazilian constitution, which actively engaged civil society, but led to a depletion and co-optation of urban social movements (Souza 2001).

Reconceptualizing Citizenship, Justice, and Freedom



The concept of citizenship, despite its potential role in addressing urban crises, is thus deeply contested—social ecology offers a way forward. Bookchin’s approach can be illustrated on two levels. On the first, he defends a system based on rights (defined alternately as civil rights or
human rights) and duties.[26] They represent a crucial stage of social
development, with the move from the uncertainty of tribal times to the introduction of a justice system based on laws (Bookchin 2005a). Rights represent the important achievements of popular struggles and should be preserved and defended (Bookchin 1986; 1999; Bookchin and Biehl 1991).



The second level is more fully developed and articulated, and addresses the core of the social ecology project, whose aim is to go beyond “contemporary citizenship within a depersonalized formal system of “rights” and “duties’” (Bookchin 1988: 238).[27] Bookchin tries to recover the “true” meaning of citizenship, referring to the Athenian formulation:





The Athenian notion of arete, the daily practice of paideia, and the
institutional structure of the polis were synthesized into an ideal of
citizenship that the individual tried to realize as a form of self-expression, not an obligatory burden of self-denial. Citizenship became an ethos, a creative art, indeed, a civic cult rather than a demanding body of duties and a palliative body of rights. (Bookchin 1995b: 75)





Citizenship thus needs to be affirmed as a praxis of citizens’ expression towards self-realization. Moreover, Bookchin recognizes the need to move towards a universal human commonality (Bookchin 2005a), thereby surpassing the parochial and non-universal connotation of citizenship as formulated in ancient Athens (Bookchin 1995b).



The concept of community, then, is crucial. An authentic community is “not merely a structural constellation of human beings but rather the practice of communizing” (Bookchin 2005a: 349). The expression of an active citizenship is then linked to the final expression of freedom, where citizenship can be conceived as a direct action that expresses itself in the practice of direct democracy, in the possibility to make decisions for one’s own community (Bookchin 2005a).



Freedom thus also becomes a crucial concept in discussions of citizenship and, most importantly, of justice. As a concept, freedom is preferable to justice, being able to more fully address the problem of inequality:





Unlike justice, which works with the pretension that all are equal in theory, despite their many differences in fact, freedom makes no pretense that all are equals but tries to compensate for the inequalities that occur with age, physical infirmity, and different abilities. (Bookchin 1995a: 260)





Classically, the concept of justice was based on the fundamental idea of equality of human beings. The reality, however, is different:



To assume that everyone is “equal” is patently preposterous if they are regarded as “equal” in strength, intellect, training, experience, talent, disposition, and opportunities. Such “equality” scoffs at reality and denies the commonality and solidarity of the community by subverting its responsibilities to compensate for differences between individuals. (Bookchin 2005a: 219)



These differences mean that human beings vary with respect to their potentials and needs. Freedom, for Bookchin, recognizes this point and posits the basis for a rational society on the idea that “as long as the means exist, they must be shared as much as possible according to needs—and needs are unequal insofar as they are gauged according to individual abilities and responsibilities” (Bookchin 2005a: 219). In social ecology, the concept of freedom is thus embedded in the idea of equality of unequals, an “unreflective form of social behavior and distribution that compensates inequalities and does not yield to the fictive claim...that everyone is equal” (Bookchin 2005a: 219).



This is opposed to the use of justice, which “turns the equality of unequals into the inequality of equals” (Bookchin 2005a: 224). Bookchin agrees with the Marxist formulation of “from each according to his/her
ability, to each according to his/her needs” In opposition to a “bourgeois right,” which claims “equality of all,” freedom abandons the very notion of “right” as such (Bookchin 2005a: 219). Freedom is thus a crucial pillar for an alternative society.

Reconceptualizing the Right to the City and Spatial Justice



Just as we reconceptualised citizenship and justice, highlighting the importance of freedom is thus necessary to reconceptualise the right to the city and spatial justice through social ecology. The libertarian or anarchist tradition seems to remain impermeable to or suspicious about the idea of rights (Turner and Miller 2005); it is uncommon for radical thinkers to use this term.[28] Contemporary rights are guaranteed and determined by states and international bodies, and, despite many significant improvements, their track record, from the standpoint of the libertarian or anarchist tradition, is poor and demands a radical change.



Questions regarding how rights are institutionalized, who guarantees them, and by what means can lead to a slippery debate. Fotopoulos (1997: 231—232), an author close to social ecology, affirms that there are two different traditions of rights. The first meaning is rooted in the “liberal conception of freedom, which is defined negatively as the absence of constraints on human activity; these rights are also defined in a negative way as ‘freedom from’, their explicit objective being to limit state power.” The second meaning, connected to the socialist tradition, opposes the liberal one, and affirms instead “social equality, mainly in the form of an equitable participation in the production and distribution of the social product, achieved through state intervention. These rights are therefore “collective” in the sense that they belong more to communities or whole societies rather than to individuals.” For Fotopoulos, however, both conceptions have limitations. Firstly, they are grounded on the reductionist idea that the political and economic spheres are always separated, missing a holistic approach to human rights. Secondly, and most importantly, both forms of rights make sense only in a statist form of government, and presuppose the existence of “political and economic power...concentrated in the hands of elites,” while, “in a non-statist type of democracy, which by definition involves the equal sharing of power, these rights become meaningless.” Bookchin goes in the same direction and, although having explored the concept of rights, he values and elaborates more on the social dimension of concepts like cooperation and mutualism, a position that is shared among social ecology authors, who have avoided basing their work on the concept of rights.[29]



A similar approach is taken with respect to the concept of justice, as seen in the previous section. Social ecology aspires to a broader change than the one proposed, for example, within the idea of a just city “in which
public investments and regulation would produce equitable outcomes rather than support those already well off” (Fainstein 2010: 3). Social ecology aspires to go beyond a mere fix of the current problems, aiming at affirming the freedom for all to self-determination.



Moreover, for social ecology it is important to go beyond the distinction between right and justice. Even if we consider the right to the city as a different right, the definition remains vague. For example, for Marcuse (2014: 5) the right to the city is “not a Right in the sense of a legal claim enforceable through the judicial system, but a moral right, an appeal to the highest of human values.” However, these highest human values remain again opaque or vague. Furthermore a radical social change cannot be limited only to the full and equal enjoyment of the resources and services concentrated in cities, as instead prescribed by the right to the city.



According to dialectical naturalism, the crucial point is to consider whether rights or justice, or other concepts, are able to foster mutualism, differentiation, and development, as proposed by Heller (1999), for the creation of an ecological society. In this way social ecology is able to broaden the discussion around those terms and put them at the service of social change. For example, in an attempt to go beyond particularism and expand the notion of the right to the city, Souza (2014) proposes the right to the planet, bridging it to the experience of social ecology (and of Cornelius Castoriadis). Moreover, the notion of a right to the planet, which is based on the affirmation of freedom, can help establish who is a citizen or not, and move us towards affirming the concept of world-wide citizenship, echoed by the verse “our homeland is the whole world, our law is liberty” (from an anarchist song of the 19th century).



Lefebvre spoke about a planetary urbanization (2003), echoing a city without limits (Bookchin 1986). Indeed, Lefebvre (2013) agrees with Bookchin’s claim that today’s cities are creating an amorphous urban environment that absorbs all the space, negating nature and the social aspects of the original meaning of city. Given this kind of planetary urbanization, it is becoming difficult to speak about a right to the city. From this perspective, Merrifield (2013) argues that Lefebvre’s right to the city may not be useful simply because we no longer have cities.



Social ecology’s proposal for a new society is, therefore, more articulated than the concept of the right to the city or spatial justice. As suggested by Souza (2012a: 24), a grassroots revolution for a new world “should be conceived as something even more complex than just the ‘right to the city’ in Lefebvre’s sense.” As we struggle, it is necessary to include concepts like political decentralization, economic de-concentration, and “conviviality” (Illich 1973), ecological soundness, egalitarian access to resources and opportunities of self-development, and ethno-diversity. And here, it is probably accurate to say that Murray Bookchin can help us better than
Henri Lefebvre.” Social ecology, with its dialectical naturalism and analysis of freedom and domination, offers powerful tools to carve out new modes for society (Venturini forthcoming).



In any case, rights to the city and spatial justice remain important concepts to be used, especially by urban social movements, as mobilizing concepts that are able to speak to a broad, transclass and transnational audience. Moreover, both concepts focus their attention on the spatiality and geography of the city and its crises. What I propose is a spatial turn for social ecology—it should pay greater attention to spatial dynamics and processes. For example, the individuation of the negation or lack of rights to the city and of spatial justice (for example where the right to the city is negated or where there is spatial injustice) would make it possible to highlight the urban crisis, and prepare the ground for struggle and the construction of an ecological society.



Further, both concepts are transformative; they presuppose a sea change in the social, economic and political sphere, clearly connecting with the power and transformative agenda of urban social movements.



However, I agree with Uitermark Nicholls and Loopmans (2012: 2548) that “while there certainly are movements claiming a right to the city, it is clear that the concept remains much more popular in academic than in movement circles.” To break this elite perspective and offer a new perspective to urban social movements, the right to the city and spatial justice assumes real value only when paired with the concept of domination. For example:





Social justice—including in this spatial justice...is, of course, fundamentally a matter of power, not simply of ethics. If injustice is supposed to be related to illegitimate, unequal access to resources and means of exercising some rights, it is related to heteronomous power: that is, to oppression and domination. (Souza 2011: 73)





The concept of “fighting against all forms of domination” towards freedom developed in social ecology can be taken as a unifying concept that includes and amplifies the agenda of both right to the city and spatial justice.



In particular, the use of the concept of “domination” allows a more holistic vision of the social issues. Social ecology does not single out specific struggles, but moves holistically against domination, with a broader understanding of crises. Social ecology, highlighting the linkages between all forms of domination, not only calls for the coordination of different struggles that urban social movements pursue, in order to reinforce them, but also highlights the need to focus on a change that is broader and more fundamental.

Conclusion



To conclude, the right to the city and spatial justice are concepts that share three principle areas of common ground. First, they go beyond class, race, and gender. Second, each is used in order to mobilize large parts of the population. Finally, they both refer to citizenship. However citizenship is not a concept that is commonly used by urban social movements because they are suspicious of a term already co-opted by the State.



Today we live in a world where we must deal with the State while finding a new revolutionary path, in an approach that Souza (2006: 327) called “together with the State, despite the State, against the State.” The concept of the right to the city is a necessary mobilizing concept, but alone it is not sufficient. Indeed, D’Souza (2018: 210) reminds us that:





We have inherited rights-based institutions. Do we need to, for that reason, demand rights, struggle for them and place our futures in its power of promise, knowing the promises are empty for most people most of the time? What did the socialists and the freedom fighters in anticolonial movements do? They demanded the real thing—food not right to food, national independence not right to independence, peace not right to peace, debt-repudiation not forgiveness.





If urban social movements want to recuperate key terms like citizenship, rights, and participation for building a truly revolutionary citizenship, they could link them to freedom and to the project of direct democracy—not only as a practice, but as a discourse. Linking these key concepts with something not yet incorporated into the current dominant system could help develop a coherent and resilient project, and gain popular support for ecological and democratic cities.

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