ancient cities

668 Right to the City
way of living (habiter). For Lefebvre, therefore, “the
right to the city is like a cry and a demand”: a cry for
those rights of man that are—or ought to be—
inalienable, and demand for those concrete rights
that might make human rights in the city obtainable,
not as a once-and-for-all good, but as an oeuvre
(work, but especially a participatory project). The
city as oeuvre, however, has as its end la Fête, a “celebration
which consumes unproductively, without
other advantage but pleasure and prestige and enormous
riches in money and object.”
Context and Argument
Le Droit à la ville was written on the occasion of
the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marx’s
Capital. Having been expelled from the French
Communist Party in 1958 after seeking reform in
the wake of the Khrushchev’s revelations of Stalin’s
atrocities and the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary,
Lefebvre both deepened his engagement with
Marx’s writings (as opposed to communist orthodoxy)
and refocused his attention on questions of
everyday life, ideology, and alienation, both in
rural studies and increasingly in an analysis of the
urban. Le Droit thus stands as a commentary on
Capital in a number of ways, but primarily through
a close analysis of how the oeuvre is alienated
within and through the space of the city and why it
is necessary to continually contest that alienation.
Le Droit was clearly also inspired by the events
of 1871 in Paris—which Lefebvre referred to in La
proclamation de la commune (1965) as “the biggest
celebration of the century and modern times”
(p. 389) and the “only crack at a revolutionary
urbanism” (p. 394)—and stands as Lefebvre’s first
attempt at theorizing the oeuvre within or as part
of the urban. As such, it led the way for several
more, including La Révolution urbaine (1970/The
Urban Revolution, 2003) and most important, La
production de l’espace (1974/The Production of
Space, 1991).
Lefebvre’s urban analysis came at a time when
urban research was in need of theoretical development.
Urban research in the social sciences remained
descriptive, relying more on empirical generalizations
than on theory as such; it was strongly technocratic.
Postwar social theory, on the other hand,
tended to avoid urban concerns, despite earlier
models of theoretical urban analysis in Durkheim
and Simmel that grounded some urban sociology.
As for Marxist theory, at the time, it tended to
deny that the urban constituted a specific social
realm and argued instead that it was largely superstructural.
Reformation of Marxist theory, thus,
was Lefebvre’s primary target.
To pierce this target, Lefebvre returned (if not
entirely explicitly) to a critical arsenal of concepts
from Marx: the dialectical relationship between use
value and exchange value. The right to the city was
a right to use, the right of appropriation (clearly
distinct from the right to property). Rights-in-the
making—at first customary, but later codified—
have the effect of “changing reality if they enter
into social practice: right to work, to training and
education, to health, housing, leisure, to life.”
These are rights of appropriation and use, and
Lefebvre drives the point home:
Among these rights in the making features the
right to the city (not the ancient city, but to
urban life, to renewed centrality, to places of
encounter and exchange, to life rhythms and time
uses, enabling the full and complete usage of
these moments and places, etc.). The proclamation
and realization of urban life as the rule of
use (of exchange and encounter disengaged from
exchange value) insist on the mastery of the economic
(of exchange value, the market, and commodities)
and consequently is inscribed within
the perspectives of the revolution under the hegemony
of the working class.
At base, this was an argument for the right not to
be excluded and especially for full political participation
in the making of the city. It was an argument
against expropriation and alienation.
Crucially, then, the right to the city required the
right to space—the right to be present and to
inhabit, as well as the right to use space. These are
themes Lefebvre took up more fully in La
Révolution urbaine and La production de l’espace.
But in the meantime the “cry and demand” of the
right to the city was picked up on the streets of
Paris, which exploded with revolutionary fervor in
May 1968, soon after Le Droit was published. Le
Droit, like the Society of the Spectacle (1967/1994)
published about the same time by Lefebvre’s interlocutor
Guy Debord, became one of the rallying
manifestos of the student and worker uprising.
Both Lefebvre and the situationists often traded
in the same vocabulary of urban analysis, most