Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary General and Rafael Correa, President of Ecuador, during the opening of Habitat III in Quito, Ecuador. October 17 2016. Dolores Ochoa AP / Press Association Images. All rights reserved
John Lennon wrote that "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." In the twenty-first century, times in which citizens are seizing the initiative in almost all areas, the right to the city could be what happens in civil society while experts are busy agreeing on its definition. The global revolt of 2011 jolted to the fore an emphatic “right to the city”. Not theoretical redefinitions, but with an image (camping out in public spaces) and a method (collective action connecting the local and the global in real time). The occupations of the Arab Spring, the 15M / Indignados movement in Spain or Occupy Wall Street made citizenship practices, ways to organize, ways to build the city visible in an almost performative way. That captivating vision of occupied public squares ended up provoking an avalanche of academic reviews of this "right to the city". The practice, though, preceded the theory.
Henry Lefebvre, who formulated the right to the city in 1967, wrote that the city "is not a finished book, but the language of the people," poeticizing social opposition to the modern city. The publication of David Harvey's Rebel Cities, in the heat of Occupy Wall Street, turned the right to the city into the "right to modify the city collectively" not always following institutions' lead. For Harvey, the right to the city means "recovering the command and management of urban surplus for the working class, as it is they who produce the city." Geographers Selene Lopez and Natalia Lerena deny that the right to the city moves downwards from academia to social movements, “instead by contrary it crystallizes a back-and-forth between academic thinking and political action" and is also a "political slogan". On the other hand, the influential Global Platform for the Right to the City, born in São Paulo in 2014, broadens the horizon of the concept towards the commons, so present in the dilemmas of our time: "The right of all inhabitants, present and future, permanent and temporary, to use, occupy and produce fair, inclusive and sustainable cities, defined as an essential common good for a full and decent life."
The city "is not a finished book, but the language of the people.
