(en) France, Alternative Libertaire AL #227 - The anti-capitalist Dico: What is the "right to the city"? (fr)

Each month, a word or vetted by Anne Arden expression. ---- Today, we hear more and more 
about the "right to the city" in planning projects as a right of access to the city, 
downtown, especially for those who have been displaced by the gentrification process (a 
form of gentrification affecting neighborhoods through the transformation of urban space). 
In the current Newspeak, the right to the city is primarily a right to mobility 
(geographical), conceived as the key to social mobility. ---- In fact, the right to the 
city, as it was designed by Henri Lefebvre in a book published a few months before in May 
1968, is a collective right that meets a social need: the right to produce the city in the 
interest of all. ---- It is directly opposed to the capitalist mode of production of the 
city in which it is the owners, real estate speculators, and sometimes the state (or local 
avatars) who decide to land use, the type of building and who has access.

This is particularly the mode of production of the city is responsible for the chronic 
shortage of affordable, quality housing for the working classes, sometimes improperly 
called "housing crisis."

Indeed, in a system in which the housing is a commodity and capital before being a 
fundamental right, the lack of housing for those who can not afford them is not an 
accident, but a structural component .

Against the capitalist logic of production of the city, which led to the increasing 
concentration of wealth and population in major cities, segregation of urban space and the 
exclusion of part of the population, the right to the city is a right to decide together 
how we produce the city, for what purpose and what society.

This law requires a reconsideration of private property in favor of a right to use 
collectively managed (which is highlighted in particular by those who squat housing left 
vacant by their owners). Finally, the right to the city is not something other than the 
self of the city by its inhabitants and its inhabitants, which makes for self-management 
of production. What is at stake in this law, according to David Harvey, one of the leading 
thinkers of the North American radical geography is promoting a new social organization to 
set up a new organization of the city (see Capitalism against the right to the city , 
Editions Amsterdam, 2011).