While shanghai is rapidly becoming a well-connected global city-region, its main limitation is1/3/2024 This general situation persists under capitalism, of course but since urbanization depends on the mobilization of a surplus product, an intimate connection emerges between the development of capitalism and urbanization. Urbanization has always been, therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control over their disbursement typically lies in a few hands. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.įrom their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Man’s most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart’s desire. Has the astonishing pace and scale of urbanization over the last hundred years contributed to human well-being? The city, in the words of urban sociologist Robert Park, is: I here want to explore another type of human right, that of the right to the city. We live, after all, in a world in which the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights. But for the most part the concepts circulating do not fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics, or the dominant modes of legality and state action. A great deal of energy is expended in promoting their significance for the construction of a better world. W e live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved centre stage both politically and ethically.
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