Lefebvre's View On The Right To The City

In Mark Davidson’s article, ‘Displacement, Space and Dwelling: Placing Gentrification Debate’, he cites several contemporary case studies where certain deteriorated areas have been targeted for redevelopment and subsequent evictions have taken place. Using several philosophical authors, such as Heidegger and Lefebvre, Davidson’s focuses on the effect spatial metaphors have on displacement, and how these concepts tie into the conceptualization of space. In this paper I will compile a thorough summary of the article and formulate a comprehensive analysis of Davidson’s arguments as well as his sources.

The paradoxical name of the imaginary city reinforces the author’s opinion about politics: a now corrupt and illusionary institution as emptied of the highest ideals of social commitment.

In “New Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Paying Attention to Political Economy and Social Justice,” Don Mitchell incorporates old ideas from Peirce F. Lewis’s original “Axioms for Reading the Landscape.” At the same time, Mitchell includes new ideas into his axioms. In Axiom 1, he explains that “the landscape is not produced through ‘our unwitting autobiography’ (as Lewis describes it), but as an act of (social, not individual) will” (2007, 34). He also stresses the idea that landscape should be produced as a commodity. In contrast, Neil Smith explains the main causes behind gentrification. Smith explains how gentrification happens through a process which he calls “rent gap” (1979, 545). In gentrification, the landscape is a commodity because it loses and gains monetary value through disinvestment and investment.

The benchmark of city dwellers is that they share a common goal for the place they live. Along with eating, playing and praying, its where they have come to fulfill their dreams of living in the big city - reaching for opportunities that are not available from where they started. Den Haag faces complex and rapidly evolving challenges and a collective unity of its inhabitants is what contributes to revolutionary initiatives. Barber reminds us that, “Cities collect people into dense communities where street politics and free speech are natural, as long as there is an open-space, an agora, to sustain them” (Mayors book – Barber 47). To not only survive, but to live and truly live is to be amongst others. A community that shapes our “social identity

In a book ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety’, by Jane Jacobs, she abstract that ‘her basic notions of what makes a neighbourhood a community and what makes a city livable’ . She stated that ‘Great Cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser’ . In her perspective of view, the great cities are differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, they are full of stranger. Strangers are not only common in a public assembly, it even more common

The system connecting the local scenes of the urban totality is itself not graspable except in its linkages of singular, particular instantiations; the landscape contoured by the webs of mass transportation provides the itinerant poet with no stable referent. It

belongs in the city that the ideal can be achieved. What this means to politics in the

Cities have been traditionally seen as the breeding grounds for citizenship, the latter usually framed in terms of dwellers having specific rights, duties, some sort of political participation and frequent interactions with each other. Yet, urbanization can also present many challenges that further disenfranchise and marginalize residents. As the most urbanized region in the world, Latin American cities highlight both of these sceneries. Industrialization and neoliberal economic policies led to the continent’s rapid urbanization, introducing large developments but also deeply segregated urban centers, characterised by strong tensions between their formal and informal dimensions. Latin American leaders’ efforts to tackle this issue have presented both setbacks and opportunities to transform the city into a more integrated space, and set the path to recognize every dwellers’ right to the city: to be in it, to enjoy it, and to build it.

With this in mind, it is important to realize that, the purpose of the right to the city is not a new movement proposition; it is in fact an idealistic tendency. That is to say, it is a controversial topic debated by many scholars such as Lefebvre, Purcell, and Harvey, who have devoted their attention almost entirely to analyze the right to the city and many aspects of the right to the city. This includes special foundation with emphasis on capitalism and democracy. Lefebvre argues that is necessary to build a political proposal. His proposal include claims for people with rights to the city in the form of ownership; as well as address the effect caused by neoliberalism such as the privatization of urban spaces, the commercial use of the

There are numerous social, economic, cultural, and political issues that accompany rapid urbanization. Concerns about rapid urbanization and violent conflicts have long been uttered in different respects: mainly this concern have related to the capacity of social orders to adjust to such development, and the likelihood that it may increase urban violence and insecurity. And on the other hand, this has related to concerns that growing political and social demands would inevitably follow the upsurge of masses in urban centres (xxx, xxx). The assumption is that political and social questions that accompany rapid urbanization could exceed the institutional capacity of a state and yield disenchantment of migrants ' expectations

Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” examines the effects of metropolitan life and the struggle to preserve one’s individuality. It notions the idea that the city creates conditions of behaviour that is unknown in the countryside and although this newfound freedom can be liberating, it is also part of the over stimulating conditions that separates the city dweller from a fellow man (Simmel, 1977). Interactions between each other inside the metropolis become short, lacking personal and emotional involvement usually found in small communities. This lack of emotional concern along with increasing stimulations inside the city creates a blasé attitude for the city dwellers. This blasé attitude is similar to a coping mechanism to assist the city dwellers with “rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves” (Simmel, 1977: 172).

This essay aims to discuss the reading by David Harvey concerning the right to the city. The essay will critic on the reading and give an insight of what Harvey means when he says that we should adopt the right to the city as both a political idea and a working slogan, (Harvey,2008:23).

Haussmann 's reconstruction and renewal of Paris represented the ‘triumph’ of middle class urban culture and value of open, accessible social spaces and a drastic improvement in the living and sanitary conditions of the city. The middle class was deeply involved in the idea of a large social sphere in order to talk and discuss all aspects of life, and the renewal of Paris with open spaces and large boulevards enabled this sphere. The unsanitary and unlivable conditions of the city previously were completely changed, which demonstrates a triumph for the middle class as they gained a clean and safe environment that separated them from the lower working class.

Cities are generators of economic life and source of changes in the world. Thereby, Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities puts into relief the role of cities on the social and economic levels, while denouncing the disastrous consequences of urban renewal programs. To that extent, in chapters 2 and 3, she discusses "The Uses of Sidewalks”, arguing that over all people need safety and trust in their city. Therefore, first she claims the necessity of keeping streets and sidewalks safe because they are the “vital organs” of cities (29). Secondly, she argues that the functioning of cities should be organized in order to foster human interaction in which “casual public

What is an urban revolution? Why is it important for cities to have one? What are that factors that cause these revolutions? In the articles The Urban Revolution by V.Gordon Childe, The Right to The City by David Harvey and lastly, What Type of Public Transit for What Type of Public? by Kafui A. Attoh, displays the different ways the residents in a city react to the social inequality and human rights.