ancient cities

important, focusing critical attention on the situation.
Derived from existentialist philosophy the
situation might be defined as a structured spacetime—the
space-time structures that establish the
limits of possibility (for everyday life or for inhabiting
no less than for the circulation of capital or
the expropriation of labor). Strategically, Debord
argued, situations needed to be upended. Taking a
cue from the surrealist playbook, situationists
sought to harness the power of displacement and
dislocation (literally, the being-out-of-place) to
expose, upset, or perhaps just maneuver around
structured space-time and in doing so to create a
new situation—a new space-time structure that
opened up new possibilities for living. Differing
more in terms of strategy than at the level of philosophy,
Lefebvre sought to expand the notion of
a situation and to generalize it, to understand, for
example, how modernity itself was a situation (if
of a particularly broad and deep scale).
For Lefebvre, therefore, a central task of revolutionary
philosophy was to reveal that situations
were always produced—and how. This is the major
argument he was moving to in Le Droit, and which
he brought to fruition in La production de l’espace.
Its importance cannot be underestimated. In Debord’s
words, “the proletarian revolution”—recall
Lefebvre’s invocation of the working class when he
referred to the right to the city as a cry and a
demand—“is that critique of human geography
whereby individuals and communities must construct
places and events commensurate with the
appropriation not just of their labor, but of their
total history.” For Lefebvre, however, more than
critique was necessary: Even more vital was the creation
of new spaces, new situations—a nurturing of
the (unalienated) oeuvre—and this in turn required
a struggle for the right to the city: a revolutionary
urbanism. As Marx’s Capital was an analysis seeking
to point the way to the production of a new
political economy built not on the expropriation and
alienation of the working classes (so as to create a
world in which humanity could flourish), then Le
Droit à la ville was designed as an analytical intervention
that might point the way toward the production
of a new space of fully urban humanity.
Intellectual Influence
In English-language urban studies, the right to the
city has probably had more of an impact as a
Right to the City
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slogan than as a worked-out theoretical or philosophical
position. Although published in 1968 and
clearly influential in the urban uprisings of that
year, Le Droit à la ville was not translated into
English until 1996, and then not completely. Even
in its full version Le Droit is more an outline or
(literally) an abstract. This was intentional. As
Lefebvre states at the outset, his goal is to open up
ideas rather than shut them down through systematic
analysis. As such, he took what he called a
cavalier attitude toward analysis and exposition.
The fuller development of Lefebvre’s urban
analysis had already been published in English,
with the 1991 translation of The Production of
Space and through the work of Edward Soja
(1989), David Harvey (1973), Neil Smith (1984),
and, after 1991, countless others, his contributions
to a spatialized social theory were well known.
With the publication of an English translation of
Le Droit à la ville, this spatialized social theory
was quickly applied to (and critically examined
within) arguments about urban transformation
and the role of rights in social struggle. Even so,
the notion of a right to the city as developed by
Lefebvre was not so much scrutinized as invoked.
Don Mitchell borrowed the title for his 2003 book
on public space, for example, but with the exception
of a few pages of explication of Lefebvre’s
ideas focused his analysis not so much on the city
as an oeuvre, but instead on the more narrow
questions of how public space in the city is structured,
who has access to it, and why this matters
for political action and urban social justice.
Similarly, most of the papers appearing in the
2002 special issue of GeoJournal on the “Rights to
the City”—papers previously presented at a May
2002 conference in Rome, Italy—elucidate specific
struggles across various cities over, for example,
urban planning and redevelopment, community gardening,
neighborhood revitalization, and citizenship
within the neoliberal “shadow state.” They spend
little time interrogating the concept of a right to the
city itself. Papers by Eugene McCann and Mark
Purcell in 2002 were exceptional in this regard. The
latter argues that the right to the city remains underdeveloped
politically and theoretically but then
oddly reduces the theoretical and political weight of
the concept to what he calls “the urban politics of
the inhabitant.” In essence, Purcell advocates a politics
of “living in” rather than actively producing
urban space, thus zeroing in on one narrow aspect