Only a global project can begin to define all the rights of individuals, by determining the conditions of their entry into practice. Let us note some of these rights: the right to town (the right not to be thrown out of society and civilisation into some space which has been produced solely for the purpose of discrimination), and the right to be different (the right not to be classified forcibly into categories which have been determined by the necessarily homogenising powers). In spite of these powers and Power itself, is it possible to put forward a project which is for the development and realisation of “freedoms” and “rights” and against their disappearing behind a smokescreen of more or less revolutionary phraseology… How can the old principle of habeas corpus be conceived and maintained, how can it be rescued from its bourgeois usage?
(Lefebvre 1973/1976: 35)
Abstract
There is a growing consideration globally of a right to the city in urban policies, strategies and legislation. The mention of this concept in the UN’s New Urban Agenda vision statement, in relation to human rights, both acknowledges and encourages this trend. It is also a result of lobbying and contestation. In the Anglo-American scholarly literature, there has been caution as to whether Henri Lefebvre intended a legal and institutionalized meaning for his ‘right to the city’. This paper reviews these debates and from that perspective examines Lefebvre’s positions on law, rights and the right to the city. It locates this within his wider political strategy and in particular the three-pronged strategy he put forward in The Urban Revolution to address the urban question—political foregrounding of the urban, promotion of self-management, and introduction of the right to the city into a transformed contractual system. By contextualizing and reviewing Everyday Life in the Modern World (published immediately before Right to the City), the paper examines Lefebvre’s thinking on rights formation, within ‘opening’, or the process of inducing change. The paper engages with meanings Lefebvre provides for rights in his concept of the right to the city, including his later conception of a contract of citizenship. The paper suggests that engagement with a fluid role of law and rights, in combination with Lefebvre’s other strategies, is important in opening the pathway he charts for the realization of this right, whether through local or global initiatives.
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Notes
Concerns over such contradictions, in particular on the role of the private sector in effecting inclusion, are voiced by Kuymulu (2013) in the context of UN-Habitat ‘co-opting’ the right to the city as a theme for its 2010 World Urban Forum.
Whereas a collective right applies to all inhabitants including future generations, a diffuse right applies to individuals who have “common legal interests but are only circumstantially connected” (Moreira 2007: 48).
Lefebvre’s “sharp critique” and “unwillingness to compromise” contributed to his marginalization in France from the mid-1970 s onwards (Kofman and Lebas 1996: 38).
The influence of social theory and trends in Brazilian intellectual thinking (Souza 1993: 74) must be acknowledged at this point.
In 1989, towards the end of his life, Lefebvre observed that “the condition of city dwellers (citadins) was degraded even further” (Lefebvre 1989/2014: 203).
Elden’s (2004: 258) listing of Lefebvre’s complete work has Everyday Life in the Modern World preceding Right to the City. This sequence is also evident when one compares the two texts. Translated into English already in 1971, Everyday Life in the Modern World has received very little if any attention in the Anglo-American scholarly discussion on Lefebvre’s work on the urban and on rights.
‘Abstract rights’ may presumably be taken as those rights enabling a free will by ensuring respect for one another.
In The Survival of Capitalism, Lefebvre (1973/1976: 37) states this position on the working class differently. In a passage on the “capacity for choice” of the working class, he writes ‘‘While the working class cannot do everything by itself…, there is also nothing that can be done without it”.
Showing how history had been influenced at least as much by misinterpretations of Marx’s thought as by his thought as such, he adds (perhaps also with a wink at efforts to identify the purest meaning of his right to the city), that “falsifications are an integral part of the fertility of great doctrines of thought” (Lefebvre 1990/2003: 249).
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Huchzermeyer, M. The legal meaning of Lefebvre’s the right to the city: addressing the gap between global campaign and scholarly debate. GeoJournal 83, 631–644 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-017-9790-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-017-9790-y