Right to the city

The idea was first articulated by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la Ville,[1][2] in which he argued that urban space should not be solely controlled by market forces, such as commodification and capitalism, but should be shaped and governed by the citizens who inhabit it.

[4] In opposition to this trend, Lefebvre raised a call to "rescue the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built" and to transform urban space into "a meeting point for building collective life".

Here we quote Tsavdaroglou and Kaika (2021): in the case of Athens, "the refugees' practices for collective production of alternative housing (e.g. clandestine squats) share many characteristics in common with what Lefebvre identified as claiming the right to the city: namely, freedom and socialisation, appropriation against private property, habitation.

Given these characteristics, [Tsavdaroglou and Kaika] argue that the Lefebvrian concept of the right to the city is most appropriate for understanding and explaining the refugees' self-organised housing practices.

[20][21] Marcelo Lopes de Souza has for instance argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "the price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre's concept"[22] and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.