The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
Olympic rings adorn Maracana Stadium for opening ceremony for 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. Jae C. Hong / Press Association Images. All rights reserved.From New York City to Berlin, Hong Kong to London, conflicts have been increasingly recorded in recent years between two urban camps. First there are those who view the city as fundamentally commercial, drawing on the city’s origin as a place of exchange made possible thanks to agricultural production - a place of economies of scale and agglomeration economics, most dramatically represented in the concept of the global city. At their extreme, proponents of this vision of the city will insist cities are essential links in a global economic system and that this is what makes them important.
Second are those who experience the city as fulfilling a human need for connection and social interaction. “The city… is a natural manifestation of that social instinct that we have. Cities define us. It’s where we’re born, get educated, grow up, get married, where we pray and play, where we get old and where we die,” explains political theorist Benjamin Barber. This perspective on the city is most clearly represented in those who fight for recognition and implementation of the Right to the City, as explained by David Harvey: “The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is…a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.”
