David Harvey’s article about a “right to the city” is an exploration of urban environments as a sort of ecosystem that seeks to regulate itself. The article describes issues of inequality that urbanization seeks to rectify in a way and primarily presents the idea that “urbanization is central to the survival of capitalism”. There is tension, in this description, between wants and needs in the urban space and the availability of those wanted or needed things. For example, the tension between unemployment and available employment. Harvey describes these as the coercive laws of competition. He also examines the parallels in the US economy between the 1970s and 2008 when the article was published amid a financial crisis.
As Harvey details, urbanization is a process that has historically absorbed surplus capital and increases the dispossession of exploited residents of cities. A right to the city dictates that we have a human right to take charge of this process, rather than allow it to be in the hands of corporations and the ultra-wealthy. The concept of a right to city as a human right takes a hopeful turn at the end of Harvey’s article as he puts forth the solution to this dispossession: people must adopt their right to the city as a “working slogan” in the same turn that it is help as a political ideal.
In Morange and Spire’s response to the idea of the right to the city, they approach the framework through the lens of the global south. Their argument targets the social inequality that plagues the global south as specific to the region. They encourage that the framework should be subject to reinterpretation from this and the specific standpoints of nations and cities of the south, rather than a sole interpretation based on Northern dominance.
After reading these pieces, I couldn’t help but think about the right to the city in terms of our current global crisis: the coronavirus pandemic. It seems to me that as the country and the economy struggle and suffer, we have a responsibility and a right to alter the idea of what the city is and means as it relates to the pandemic. This includes the way we occupy space, terms of our employment and how we can work to decrease what feels like insurmountable dispossession.
Works Cited
Harvey, D (2008) “Right to the City” New Left Review
Morange, Marianne and Amandine Spire. (2015) “A Right to the City in the Global South?” Metropolitics.
Sarah, great point about using the Right to the City framework to think about the pandemic, and what it means for democratic decision making, the collective good, and even use of space. I would also say that Harvey is pointing to the endemic instability of capitalism with the cyclical crashes rather than an ecosystem that regulates itself.