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This chapter explores key arguments for assigning greater constitutional status and standing to cities and their residents. It suggests that existing arguments for enhanced city power do not acknowledge or appreciate the full scope of urban centers’ constitutional powerlessness, and overlook crucial aspects of urban agglomeration, in particular in the Global South. To address these shortcomings, this chapter develops six fresh arguments for extending constitutional status to cities that have not been given due attention in the pertinent literature. These include considerations of electoral parity, economic inequality, the right to housing, climate change, density, diversity, democratic stakeholding, federalism and subsidiarity, all pointing to an acute need for a modified spatial conceptualization of the city in the constitutional state. En route, the chapter explores several constitutional designs that may remedy the systemic underrepresentation of urban voters while providing suitable voice to rural area constituencies.

This chapter constructs a meaningful association between differential space and the right to the city. In so doing it seeks to both flesh out Lefebvre’s sketchy differential space idea and contextualise it in the contingencies of the 21st century. Second, it is the visual culmination of the book delivered through a series of images that add an analytical twist to the explication of differential space. This chapter differs from the previous six in that research material from all three case study cities is presented in order to demonstrate the divergent origins and various kinds of differential space, from ludic to politicised-democratic, that are produced through similar processes involving civic society engagement, urban policy, planning and regeneration.

Chapter 7 puts the lessons from the anarchist urban activism and praxis of Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails into dialogue with the work on the Right to the City. While sympathetic to and inspired by these theorists’ work on radical urbanism, the author criticizes productionist predilections and highlights that centralized homelessness removes the focus on formal economic production. The chapter contends that by focusing on the homeless, a more robust and radical conception of urban space as commons can be developed, which allows for rights to opacity and survival in urban space.

A vital but often neglected part of the urban restructuring of Los Angeles has been a resurgent activism that has created some of the most innovative urban social movements in the country. The Justice Riots of 1992, as they are now called, stimulated vigorous grassroots and place-based coalitions of labor unions and community-based organizations seeking to deal with the enormous inequalities and injustices brought about by globalization and the formation of the New Economy. Affected to some degree by the critical spatial perspective espoused by the Los Angeles research cluster, these new coalitions were among the earliest in the United States to adopt specifically spatial strategies, and in these cases, thinking spatially about justice made a difference. This spatial turn in the justice movement is traced through three organizations: the Bus Riders Union and its initiating sponsor, the Labor/Community Strategy Center; the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE); and, most recently, the Right to the City Alliance.

This chapter focuses on urban change, and the social tensions it triggered, in the Polish city of Łódź. Kacper Pobłocki embeds the discussion in the feature film, Knife in Water, by Roman Polanski, casting it against the urban realities of 1960s socialist Łódź. Urban collective consumption lay at the very heart of an emergent postwar Eastern Europe, and in the case of Łódź, Poland’s famous textile center, water was central to social conflict. Pobłocki links public grievances over social mobility with concurrent displays of conspicuous consumption (particularly centered on private leisure) as well as the overconsumption of urban (and “public”) amenities such as water. In Poland, he argues, the struggles over urban space and collective consumption led to the dramatic events of 1968, and left an indelible mark on contemporary Polish society. Poland’s trajectory, in fact, should be understood as a different version of the same “urban Keynesianism” emerging on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Ultimately, Pobłocki concludes, there are reasons to see the events of 1968 East and West as related: in both cases, the “urban crisis” of the 1960s was a clash between conflicting visions of what constituted meaningful urban life.

This article considers contestations over land, state and nation in Aitarak Laran, an urban settlement in post-independence Timor-Leste. Since 2010 the settlement has been resisting eviction by the East Timorese state, which wishes to use the land it occupies to build a National Library and Cultural Centre. The contestation at Aitarak Laran reveals counter-posed imaginings of land as homeland, territory and property. In the settlement, the promises of independence—unity, equivalence, and inclusion within the sovereign nation-state—are at odds with residents’ experiences of what independence has in fact brought. Land, in its multiple imaginings, becomes a crucible upon which this painful disjuncture plays out. Reading Aitarak Laran as an instance of “right to the city” struggle, these tensions emerge as well not only in practice but also in theory, reflected particularly in the limitations and ambiguities of rights discourse.

This chapter applies different concepts of radical street theatre and urban performance in order to theorize the ways in which food trucks form temporary communities in urban spaces through embodied, performative intervention. An ethnographic portrait of one of Toronto’s first and best-known food truck entrepreneurs, Fidel Gastro, is employed to demonstrate the precarious position food trucks hold within the political narratives governing public space in the city of Toronto, and the ambivalence food truck entrepreneurs display toward current configurations of urban market economies. David Harvey’s conception of the right to the city is then critically applied to this scenario in order to argue that food trucks harbor the potential to intervene in dominant urban narratives, allowing urban dwellers to assert the common right to change ourselves by changing our cities.

This chapter opens with an autobiographical introduction to the author’s experiences squatting at Casa del Sol in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the South Bronx. The connections between squatting, urban homesteading, and community garden activism are introduced through the story of the 1999 fight to preserve hundreds of community gardens. The questions raised through those experiences drive this research. The study of squatting makes the contested and dynamic nature of value, urban citizenship, claims on urban space, and property claims in particular, highly visible. In a neoliberalizing city, squatters’ initiative could be coopted into a discourse of individual responsibility. At the same time, squatters’ actions challenged neoliberal projects of privatization and commodification of urban space. While squatters claimed a right to the city based on their labor and their status as urban citizens, as new homeowners in an era where the social meanings of debt and homeownership were being renegotiated, they also used history and property rights to develop new ways of being part of the city. The chapter closes with a description of the research and writing process for the book, with an emphasis on the role of oral history methods, and an overview of the book’s structure.

Chapter 6 analyzes the broader political goals that activists and their supporters advance when they organize for environmental revitalization. They challenge public officials and planners who prioritize developments in the neighborhood and decide the neighborhood's significance in Barcelona, Havana, and Boston. They also fight existing racist and classist stigmas and stereotypes about low-income and minority residents. Much of their broader political work has focused on giving residents a greater sense of dignity, addressing vulnerable individual and family situations, and resisting broader processes of encroachment, excessive tourism development, and environmental gentrification. Activists emphasize that unless they acknowledge development, growth, and gentrification, fighting for community reconstruction and place remaking will be fruitless, and environmental justice achievements will be jeopardized. Consequently, they have aimed at controlling projects and activities taking place within the neighborhood territory, gaining secure tenure over the land, and building residents’ stewardship of it. They have set up and maintained physical and symbolic borders with outsiders whom they see as threats to the stability and cohesion of their neighborhood. Last, as activists fight against outside threats and influences, they create self-managed spaces and new models for democratic planning and participation in the city and recapturing the roots of democracy.

This chapter presents a case study from Copenhagen on a community-based, but state-initiated urban gardening effort to examine what such efforts mean for the minorities’ (the homeless and the ethnic minorities’) right to the city (Purcell, 2002; 2013) especially within the context of a traditionally welfare-driven, but increasingly neoliberalized urban context. David Harvey has described the right to the city as “not merely a right of access to what already exists, but a right to change it after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003). As such, in this chapter the concept of “right to the city” is operationalized as a measure or proxy for social and spatial justice to explore how the state-initiated community gardening effort in the Sundholm District shapes/secures/denies the homeless and the ethnic minorities’ ability to, a) use and just be in the physical space of the garden (a public space) and b) to translate this into access to the political space of urban governance (and governance of the garden space) where they can voice their needs/concerns.

Critics have argued that “the right to the city” is problematic because it emphasizes the rights-bearing individual rather than the political group and focuses on the distribution of goods (“the city”) rather than the production of inequalities. Chapter 9 responds to these concerns by examining the Marxian critique of rights and introducing the concept of hetero-rights, which is a dialectical-political rather than an abstract-philosophical approach to right. From the perspective of private property, a right to the city is incomprehensible in so far as no one can assert a conventional property right to the city. This paradox forces us to think about the city through the lens of social rather than private property.

This chapter examines Mexican street food as a spatial practice that shapes the cultural landscape of Oakland, California. Community activist Emilia Otero fights for street food vendors’ right to occupy public space along city’s streets in East Oakland. She helps legitimize informal commerce in the Fruitvale district and paves the way for street food vendors to develop their businesses--from pushcarts and taco trucks to restaurants. The chapter calls attention to the friction that arises between the rationally planned city and the ways in which marginalized community groups live the city through their daily routines. It argues that remaking city streets to accommodate informal cultural practices is a way claim one’s right to the city.

Often overlooked, internal displacement affects millions around the globe. Colombia’s protracted conflict, which has internally displaced approximately six million people (IDMC 2015a, 2015b), has embedded social exclusion and violence as features of everyday life for many Colombians who find themselves living in informal settlements on the urban periphery. Increasingly, connections between urban exclusion, insecurity and poverty can be read as a ‘violent’ failure of citizenship (Koonings and Kruijt 2007, 12) that negates the lived experience of those on the margins. This chapter contends that despite this negation those who struggle to survive make claims of the right to belong to (and in) the city through placing their bodies in public spaces as well as finding new articulations of place and belonging amongst the complexities of the everyday. Through exploring these acts this chapter asks how the internally displaced challenge established notions of the right to the city and are prompting alternative articulations of belonging.

In Chapter Nine, John Blewitt makes the important point that over half the world's population lives in cities and that this is increasing exponentially. As a consequence, the ‘natural’ world is predominantly urban, as is the global economy. The chapter argues that the fate of the planet depends upon the nature of our urban future. If we are to achieve social and environmental justice within the city, there needs to be a transformed and renewed right to urban life. Rights and urban citizenship – and, to a significant degree, social learning for sustainability – entail active engagement in the public realm and genuinely public spaces and places.

The concluding chapter is written more as an essay than as a conclusion. While it offers some synthesis of earlier chapters, it also posses a thought experiment for the reader, asking: “do we have that right to be local?” Combining conversations on communication rights and the right to communicate with those spurred by Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey on the right to the city, this chapter reflects on the issues that lay ahead for media localism, focusing specifically on municipal broadband and digital infrastructures. The right to be local brings communication rights and the right to the city together by allowing us to consider the roles of both information and infrastructure and of physical places and social relationships.

This chapter deals with the Elyssar project, developed in 1995, which aimed to destroy large areas of informal settlements located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, whose residents had been displaced from southern Lebanon. The project was abandoned due to resistance from Hezbollah and Amal. The study of the cases put forward by the various social actors shows that notions of justice and law are based on the political agendas of each party. At the same time, ‘rights to the city’ are refused to stigmatized Shi‘is and rural populations.

This chapter critically evaluates the utility of social and spatial resilience to the voluntary sector in residual service hubs, both in terms of resilience as a phenomenon to be studied in its own right but also its utility for social and critical geography, and for the study of the voluntary sector. Resilience can be seen as a social and spatial struggle as important as any effort to secure the ‘right to the city’ (but garnering far less attention), with at least some critical potential. While much of the chapter is concerned with the real-world application of previously-developed concepts about resilience, survival and gentrification, the centerpiece innovation is the presentation and consolidation of a new perspective on resilience captured by the ‘critical resilience of the residuals’. But Chapter 11 by no means gives a carte blanche to resilience – it is both a deconstruction and reconstruction of resilience, a stress-test following the extended case study. Indeed, the results suggested some shortcomings to the concept, some of which are difficult to surmount, prompting the need to supplement resilience with alternative concepts such as ‘commons’.

Examines the impacts of the sharpening gentrification process in Northeast Los Angeles and its socioeconomic and racial overtones as immigrant working class Latino/a families are increasingly threatened by displacement through rent increases, evictions, and socially traumatic uprooting of multi-family networks. Gentrification is tied to neoliberal local state efforts in Los Angeles to incentivize private investment through urban policy strategies like transit-oriented development, transit villages and small lot housing development. I argue the creative frontier of urban restructuring in Northeast LA also generates social violence expressing capitalism’s tendency to foster “accumulation by dispossession” that has been countered by neighborhood “right to the city” movements. I examine the rise of the urban social movements like Friends of Highland Park and Northeast LA Alliance that advocate for the rights of those threatened by housing displacement and eviction, address community and environmental impacts of new high-density housing projects, and campaign for more socially just housing and urban planning policies in Los Angeles. There is also examination of the plight of the homeless and rehabilitating gang members

The geographer John Pickles defines place as the locus of natural and social life worlds, which provides an operative context of common understandings, institutions, and practices along with the natural environment that sustains the life of communities. He characterizes the defense of these “commons” as the arena in which place-based activism takes center stage. From opposition to mountaintop removal mining to forest and waterways environmentalism, “commons” activism has a long history in Appalachia. The author provides theoretical guidelines for how to think about this activism in relation to the Occupy movement, Right to the City, global labor, and worldwide autonomization movements.