The Right to the City

The right to the city is a cry and a demand that must be heard. It is also a cry around which demands can be formulated by all those who have, over the years, been excluded from the corridors of power. This platform articulates these demands.

The right to the city is not simply a demand for access to the immense treasure of public resources that comprise a city. It is also a demand for empowerment to create a new city in a different image, an image that is not restricted to the financiers, the developers, the well-heeled, and the billionaires who grease the wheels of political machines and who, over the last thirty years, have exercised an exclusive and exclusionary right to shape the city after their own desires.

The right to the city brings together a vast array of movements combating social and environmental injustice. Within this movement lies a revelatory recognition of connections that must be challenged. Gentrification and foreclosures displace entire populations. Inadequate provision of housing for displaced low-income populations gives rise to homelessness, which political power primarily approaches through criminalization.This then feeds a prison-industrial complex that, at enormous public expense, destroys human beings in both body and soul. The fight against gentrification and foreclosures is, therefore, a fight against criminalization and homelessness. The fight for decent and affordable housing for low-income populations is a fight against homelessness and the politics of incarceration.

The fight for open public space for all is a fight not only to be present in the spaces of the city without surveillance and police harassment, but also a right to new open spaces in which people may freely gather, socialize, and have their needs for health care and education appropriately met.The right to the city entails a right to a decent education along with meaningful and gainful employment in creating new wealth by whatever means – including in the home – as well as rebuilding the physical and social fabric of the city.The right to the city is a strategy for the revitalization and enrichment of every aspect of urban life.

Movements that recognize all these connections now make common cause. Together they realize they can accomplish more than the sum of their individual actions. Mutual aid and mutual support is their organizing principle and systematic change of daily life in the city to the benefit of the least privileged is their aim.

The right to the city is a collective right, collectively exercised. It is a universal right that connects all urban dwellers across the nation and the world. It calls for all social movements to engage in a common cause to take back what has been lost through more than thirty years of the pillaging of the public domain by private interests.

This naked class privilege to determine the character and meaning of urban life is what the Right to the City alliance directly contests. It contests the racializations and the discriminations based on gender and sexuality that still haunt us after so many years of struggle. It demands a more egalitarian and democratic form of governance that acts in the interest of the common people.

The Right to the City is a cry and demand that must be – and will – be heard.

David Harvey

City University of New York

Right to the City NYC, Policy Platform 2009, Forward – p.4.