The Universal Declaration of Urban Rights

‘What is our actual right to the city?’  This ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city’ (Harvey, 2008) aims to “rescue the citizen as the main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built” and to transform urban space into “a meeting point for building collective life” (Lefebvre, 1968). To build a city for the many, not the few.

 From the coining of the right in Henri Lefebvre’s influential ‘Le droit à la ville’ (1968) to the protest signs of urban movements around the world and its adoption into the United Nations New Urban Agenda (2016) – the concept has inspired public, private and civic actors in rethinking and reacting upon increasingly unequal urbanities.

 “But what legal rights are there that support our actual right to the city? We invite two legal experts to explain the role of the law in claiming the right to the city.”