Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Nathaniel ColemanORCiD
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
Conflation of Lefebvre's key idea of ‘the right to the City’ with a ‘right to the centre’ (or ‘centrality’) is examined (Lefebvre 1991; 1996). Gentrification makes construing the two as interchangeable irrelevant, but associating them spatializes ‘the right to the City’, securing it from becoming an abstract generalised ‘inalienable right’. ‘The right to the city [. . .] is a right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey 2008: 23). But how does Lefebvre imagine how this right could be claimed and practiced? Is ‘[c]onstant community participation and involvement’ the only way to lay claim to the city (Rykwert 2000: 246)? Importantly, is it ‘a right to participate in life at the core’? Or is it ‘quite simply’ not ‘the right right that needs articulating’ (Merrifield 2011: 471, 473)? Rejecting the centre is examined as an act of resistance to neoliberal spatial practises that enhances ‘the Right to the City’. Retreat from the Centre is empowering: utopian, rather than a surrender to prevailing conditions, despite Lefebvre's association of ‘centrality’ with ‘the right to the city' (Lefebvre 1991; 1996).
Author(s): Coleman N
Editor(s): Michael E Leary-Ohwin & John P. McCarthy
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, The City and Urban Society
Year: 2020
Pages: 522-532
Print publication date: 05/12/2019
Online publication date: 21/11/2019
Acceptance date: 07/12/2016
Edition: 1st
Publisher: Routledge
Place Published: Abingdon, Oxon
URL: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Henri-Lefebvre-The-City-and-Urban-Society-1st/Leary-Owhin-McCarthy/p/book/9781138290051
Notes: In the modern, spectacular city of consumption, wandering constitutes a radical act of resistance, free of purpose in any quantifiable sense. It is in this spirit that Nanni Moretti’s first chapter of his 1993 film ‘Dear Diary’ (‘Caro Diario’), ‘On My Vespa’, is considered. But this also associates the chapter with Lefebvre’s emphasis on self-determination. While it might seem a small point, the dominant assumption that Lefebvre’s assertion of ‘the right to the city’ refers to the existing city (whichever one prefers), that it is a legal right, rather than a moral one, and that it encompasses only city centres, ultimately obscures what is most radical in his urban thinking (which this chapter aims to recuperate): only utopian visions of urban difference – at the scale of traditional cities and exploding urbanism – could redeem the human habitat by emphasising use over exchange, and the concrete over the abstract, in the production of heterogeneous, rather than homogeneous spaces of difference.
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781138290051
