The Right to the City Revisited: Charting and Envisioning Future Struggles and Politics

Abstract

We live in rebel cities in riotous times. Everyday struggles in the urban fabric are recast in a terrain woven by the dirty word of gentrification or within ghettoes of no-go areas. Despite the asymmetric power-relations between economic and political elites and subaltern, the subalterns are not mere victims or spectators in the erection of urban frontiers. Their very presence, their ways of inhabiting and transforming the world; in short, they are producing urban space making them vital constitutional elements of the city as an œuvre. The realization of the right to the city is not the concluding paragraph of the history of urban struggles that will inevitably lead to absolute liberation. It is an open process happening now; a disputable and controversial enjeu around which subjectivities build their present and future. And it is happening every day. The subalterns indeed speak; more importantly, they act.