Whose Right to What City? Learning to Resist Colonization in Settled Cities

• In Event: Collaborations Against Settler Colonialism: Excavating the Educational Sites and Possibilities of Decolonization

Abstract

Critical educational theorists and researchers are increasingly turning to the notion of the “right to the city,” as a practice and theory that can help us think about and mobilize for the radical transformation of society (e.g., Lipman, 2011; Ford, 2013; Means, 2014). Yet this work has tended to present a rather superficial portrayal of the right to the city, and it has not delved into the deep debates and contradictions within right to the city literature. Moreover, both the right to the city literature and the secondary educational work on it have thus far ignored the question of settler colonialism. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by turning to the occupation of Palestine. We begin by surveying the educational work done thus far on the right to the city. We then identify several key debates that this work has not yet considered: What kind of a right is the right to the city? Whose right is it? What, precisely, is the city? Is it more proper to speak of the urban? How has the right to the city been taken up differently in the global North and South?
The next part of the presentation engages the preceding debates while exploring the challenges presented by settler colonialism, understood as a persistent structure upheld through ongoing violence (Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013). We highlight the Palestinian struggle for liberation in order to illustrate that right to the city movements which disregard colonial legacies are necessarily predicated on the continued suppression of the right to the city for indigenous peoples’ struggling to realize the city as oeuvre. We consider how Israel’s destruction of Palestinian schools and censorship of school curriculum in both the Occupied Territories and Israeli schools, particularly through the erasure of Palestinian history and culture in school texts, has functioned to uphold the settler colonial regime. Alternatively, we present some ways in which education has been taken up for liberatory purposes by Palestinians struggling to obtain their right to a decolonized city. Given the entanglement of cities linked under the exploitative conditions of global capitalism, imperialism, and settler colonialism, we argue that right to the city movements cannot be narrowly focused on individual cities as isolated entities and, further, that education can play a crucial role in rendering apparent the intertwinement of cities in order to incite global struggles for the right to the city.

Author

• Derek Ford