Uptown Uprising and the Right to the City
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“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. 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 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.” — David Harvey , The Right to the City
The 1968 French student-worker uprising popularized the phrase “The Right to the City” from philosopher Henri Lefebvre‘s book Le Droit a la ville. According to Lefebvre the right to transform the urban environment cannot be restricted to people who own substantial property, hold citizenship papers or are otherwise deemed to have a higher social status. It means all of us, regardless of race, gender, age, economic status or any narrowly defined category. The city is a place of possibilities and we have a basic human right to make those possibilities realities.
May 1968: Beginning of a long struggle