ancient cities

capital as an end in itself, but would yield superior
‘ends.’” The right to the city, Lefebvre concludes, is
“the right of citizens-city dwellers, and the groups
that they constitute (on the basis of social relations),
to be central to [figurer] the resources and circuits
of communication, information, and exchange.”
The right to the city is thus the right to be—to be an
integral part of the city. “This does not depend on
an urban ideology, nor an architectural intervention,
but of an essential quality or property of urban
space: centrality,” he said. The right to the city is a
right to produce that centrality—the right not to be
marginal—as an oeuvre.
Don Mitchell and Joaquín Villanueva
See also Harvey, David; Lefebvre, Henri; Revanchist City;
Social Production of Space
Further Readings
Dikeç Mustafa. 2001. “Justice and the Spatial
Imagination.” Environment and Planning A 33:1785–
1805.
Debord, Guy. [1967] 1994. Society of the Spectacle.
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York:
Zone Books.
Harvey, David. 1973. Social Justice and the City.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 2003. “The Right to the City.” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 27:939–41.
Kofman, Eleonore and Elizabeth Lebas. 1996. “Lost in
Transposition—Time, Space and the City.” Pp. 3–60
in Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, edited and
translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1965. La proclamation de la commune
[The cry of the commune]. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1968. Le droit à la ville [The right to the city].
Paris: Anthropos.
———. 1970. La revolution urbaine [The urban
revolution]. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1974. La production de l’espace [The production
of space]. Paris: Anthropos.
———. [1972] 2000. Espace et politique: le droit à la
ville [Space and politics: the right to the city]. Paris:
Editions Economica.
———. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Translated by
Robert Bononno. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
McCann, Eugene. 2002. “Space, Citizenship, and the
Right to the City: A Brief Overview.” GeoJournal
58:77–79.
Riis, Jacob
671
Merrifield, Andy. 2006. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical
Introduction. New York: Routledge.
Mitchell, Don. 2003. The Right to the City: Social
Justice and the Fight for Public Space. New York:
Guilford.
Purcell, Mark. 2002. “Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to
the City and the Urban Politics of the Inhabitant.”
GeoJournal 58:99–108.
Smith, Neil. 2003. “Foreword.” Pp. vii–xxiii in Henri
Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Steaheli, Lynn and Lorraine Dowler, eds. 2002. Social
Transformation, Citizenship, and the Right to the
City, Special issue. GeoJournal 58(2/3).
RiiS, Ja c o b
Jacob Riis (1849–1914) was a crusading journalist
who brought New York City’s overcrowded,
decrepit slums to the consciousness and conscience
of middle-class America. Best known for his photograph-filled
1890 book, How the Other Half Lives,
Riis spurred housing, school, and neighborhood
reforms in cities throughout the United States.
Riis was born in Ribe, Denmark, a schoolmaster’s
son. His modestly comfortable childhood and
its rural village were roots of his later advocacy of
urban housing reform, as was his Christian faith
and sense of morality. Riis’s fondness for stories,
particularly those by Charles Dickens, motivated
him to learn English, but he disliked school and
pursued carpentry. Crushed by romantic rejection
and angling for adventure, Riis left for the United
States in 1870.
Work in short-term carpentry, construction, and
mining jobs and then as a traveling salesman was
sporadic, and Riis experienced days of hunger and
homelessness. One cold night, Riis and his adopted
dog turned to a police station for shelter. For years,
New York City police stations had served as shelters
of last resort for homeless men and women,
providing planks of wood for sleeping on the station’s
cellar floor at night. That night, Riis’s locket
was stolen, and a disbelieving officer beat Riis’s
protective dog to death. Riis attributed his drive to
improve the lives of the poor and restore respect for
life in the slums to this incident.
By 1873, Riis turned to newspaper work, moving
through jobs at a Long Island City weekly, a