The “right to the city” in urban social movements

The movements currently gathering under the claim for the “right to the city” could mark a new phase in the development of urban social movements – one where a novel type of coalition across the city appears to have the potential to unify a multiplicity of urban demands under one common banner and thus to create a real challenge to neoliberal planners, politicians, and developers. The claim for the right to the city has turned into a viral slogan across Europe, North America as well as Latin America, because it fuses and expresses a variety of issues that have become highly charged over years of neoliberal urban development and even more so through the effects of the financial and economic crisis. They have made the loss of social, economic, and political rights painfully tangible not just for traditionally disadvantaged and marginalized groups, but increasingly also for comparatively privileged urban residents, whose notion of the good urban life is not realized by increasing privatization of public space, in the “upgrading” of their neighborhoods, or the subjection of their everyday lives to the intensifying interurban competition. At the same time, the “right to the city” has also developed traction with international NGOs and advocacy organizations, some of whom have taken to work on formal covenants and even a world charter for the right to the city.1 Additionally, a host of governments on different scales have incorporated a “right to the city” in their legislation or in various urban reform projects. However, the substance of the “right to city” as defined in such legal instruments and guidelines2 is not necessarily identical with what local movements are aiming at when they take to the streets to protest gentrification and displacement, the imposition of urban mega-projects in their neighborhoods, the closing of local public service institutions, or the intensifying surveillance ofurban space – even if all of these forms of activism invoke Lefebvre and envision a city that is more just, sustainable, and democratic. In order to explain this multifaceted emergence of the “right to the city” motto in local as well as global contexts, the first part of this chapter contextualizes this slogan in relation to the historical development of urban social movements. Seen in this context, the contemporary movements directed against neoliberal urban development appear significantly distinct from earlier phases that urban movements have gone through since the crisis of Fordism. In the current period, urban protests and the claims made on urban development correspond with specifically neoliberal designs and enclosures that they address, more and less radically – while they are also shaped by the legacies of prior phases of urban struggles. Thus, in order to understand the novelty and specificity of contemporary movements assembling under the slogan of the “right to the city,” they are here interpreted within the framework of a phase model of the development of urban movements. This will allow us, in the second part of the chapter, to identify relevant differences in the practice and goals of the broad spectrum of “right to the city” movements – on one end of the spectrum, groups and organizations working to get charters passed seek to protect specific rights (plural) in order to secure participation for all in the city (as it exists); on the other end of the spectrum, more activist movements seek to create the right to a (more open, genuinely democratic) city through social and political agency. This distinction allows, in a third, final step, a critical analysis of actually existing “right to the city” movements in first world metropoles, i.e. of those coalitions of leftist and alternative movements, artists and creative professionals, minority and community-based organizations, and the sundry citizens initiatives that mobilize, often successfully, against the restructuring of their neighborhood. What on first glance looks like a successful convergence of different protest groups under the banner of the “right to the city” may be problematized against the background of the transformed role of metropoles of the global North within the new international division of labor. Even though these coalitions do frequently succeed in preventing, or at least modifying, crass neoliberal urban development projects, their struggles often end up saving some oases and protected spaces only for the comparatively privileged protagonists, spaces which increasingly become instrumentalized in creative city branding efforts in the competitive entrepreneurial urban policy game. The chapter thus raises the question whether “right to the city” movements in the global North need not relate more directly to the struggles of groups that have been excluded from the model of the neoliberal city. Such struggles include those of the dispossessed at the peripheries of this model in the global North (whether in banlieues or ghettos), and the urban struggles taking place in the global South – even if the conflicts struggled over and the everyday practices of these movements differ vastly.