The Right to the City

by Tarryn de Kock, 2012

The city exists as a space and place of multiple meanings that are performed by those concerned with it on a daily basis. It is a place of work and play, home and holiday, prayer and education, relaxation and activity, and as such forms part of the way people perceive themselves and who they aspire to be. David Harvey adapts the idea of the right to the city from Henri Lefebvre, and asserts that it should be both a working slogan for urban change, as well as the political ideal backing it (Harvey 2008:40). However, how do these ideas translate into action for people living on the margins? The right to the city is not a simplistic concept, as will be elaborated on in this response, and the action taken to address it thus cannot be simplistic either. The city is a constantly changing space, and its meanings are contested on a daily basis because of that change and complexity (Adebayo 2010:2). Harvey’s ideas on the right to the city have sustainable merit, but arguably he fails to qualify how the democratisation of urban resources will in any manner relate to a change in the real value of urban life for marginalised people, and people outside urban spaces too. In this response, issues of group identity, the criminalisation of the urban poor and the way the city is conceptualised according to rights will be explored against the backdrop of the right to the city.