Right to the city: A concept in dispute

The diagnosis that the right to the city has become a catchphrase to address a wide range of issues related to the experience of living in cities is often combined with the idea of the loss of specificity of the concept. In addition to it’s vagueness, the loss of it’s potential critical core is also denounced as an effect of it’s institutionalization in national laws and official programs from international organizations such as UN-HABITAT and UNESCO. This diagnosis was synthesized by Margit Mayer: the right to the city has undergone the transformation "from protest to program".

Assuming that this diagnosis is right, my concern is less to denounce this process as a misrepresentation of Lefebvre’s le droit a la ville, but rather to question how this transformation occured. For that, the origin of the use of the term ‘right to the city’ in international foruns is my starting point to analyse how the formulations of the concept as a “new social contract” or as a “right to urban citizenship” point to a dispute of interests anchored in a specific social arrangement. The vagueness shouldn’t be interpreted here as a lack, but as constitutive of a political agreement.

I’ll narrow my analysis to the first two institutional discussions in which the right to the city appeared: the round-table Towards a city of solidarity and citizenship held by UNESCO in 1995 as a preparation for HABITAT-II and the discussion of the proposals during the City Summit in 1996. I’ll try to demonstrate the attempts to turn the right to the city into an operational concept are part of a broader strategy to legitimize additional intervention powers to the city’s local authority in order to reconcile market economy and a minimum standard of social development, a role previously played by the Welfare State.