Abstract
The strategy and demand for the ‘right to the city’ was first advanced by Henri Lefebvre in the late-1960s. The concept has been used as a slogan by urban movements in various countries since the 2000s, and has also been discussed in left academic literature. This special section of Capital & Class contains interviews on contemporary urban politics and the right to the city by two Marxist urbanists, Neil Smith and Jamie Gough. These are preceded by a brief history by Jamie Gough of the idea and use of the slogan. Neil Smith died in September 2012. Jamie Gough begins this special section with an appreciation of Neil’s enormous contribution to Marxist geography.
Introduction
The strategy and demand for ‘the right to the city’ (hereafter RTC) was first advanced by the great Marxist social scientist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the late-1960s. For Lefebvre, the RTC meant the design, production and control of all aspects of the city by the collective working class. Although little used in the thirty years that followed Lefebvre’s proposal, since the 2000s the slogan has been taken up by urban movements in many countries. These movements have often used RTC to refer to the right to the use of urban public spaces and the right to live in (central or inner) cities. It has also referred, more widely, to the right of residents to participate in decisions on spending by local governments, and to economic arrangements for the supply of affordable housing. The RTC was even incorporated into Brazil’s new constitution in 2001.
During this period, a considerable left academic literature on the RTC has also appeared (for example Mitchell 2003; Sugranyes and Mathivet 2010; Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer 2011). In 2008, David Harvey, the Marxist geographer and urbanist, published an influential essay on the RTC, in which he argued for the usefulness of the slogan in Lefebvre’s meaning, while giving it a particular interpretation. In 2011 Özlem Çelik interviewed the Marxist geographers and urbanists Neil Smith and Jamie Gough on the RTC, Harvey’s article, and contemporary urban politics more generally; these are to be published in Turkish in Çelik, Çarıkçı and Türkmen (forthcoming). This section of Capital & Class contains the two interviews, previously unpublished in English. The interview with Jamie Gough has been updated for this edition.
In September 2012, Neil Smith unexpectedly died at the age of 58. We begin, therefore, with a brief appreciation of Neil’s major contribution to the development of Marxist and revolutionary geography.
The section continues with a short history of the idea of ‘the right to the city’, particularly useful for readers who are not urbanists. This explains the power and appeal of the slogan, but also the variety of meanings in which it has been used. This is followed by the two interviews. These consider contemporary urban problems, the connections between them and the ways in which urban movements can make connections between these problems; the record of recent urban struggles; the usefulness of the slogan ‘the right to the city’; Harvey’s argument that struggle should focus on the production and use of surplus value in the city; the dialectics between the particular and the universal; and finally the relations between urban, national and international politics.