A Human Right to Our City? Remaking Global Urban Space

• In Event: Places, Spaces, and Motion

Abstract

A key dimension of human rights expansion has been the linking of human rights and cities, encompassing discourses of “human rights in the city”, “human rights cities”, and “the right to the city”. These developments variously link human rights responsibilities to local authorities, incorporate international human rights standards into local law, and declare the rights of individuals to “inhabit, use, occupy, produce, govern and enjoy” cities. While the move to localise and urbanise human rights is partly driven by urban justice movements, as well as a recognition of the dangers of a hierarchical international human rights regime, it nonetheless retains the legalistic, individualising, and depoliticising orientation of conventional liberal human rights. This gives rise to the question of whether the linking of human rights and cities provides space for creatively and radically rethinking rights, or merely transposes existing human rights, and their attendant closures and limitations, to a different geographic scale. To explore the possibilities of cities as spaces of creative rights praxis I return to Henri Lefebvre, focusing on his linking of the right to the city to the social production of space. I argue that in our contemporary moment, a meaningfully radical right to the city must confront the social production of globalised urban space under racial neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on Guy Debord’s notion of derivè, Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, and Ananya Roy’s analysis of racial banishment, I argue a human rights praxis conceptually and ethically adequate to the injustice of contemporary global urbanism must enable a reimagining of the city as pluralistic public space, in which all denizens are able to take an equal part in the creation of the city, as a political, cultural, and economic space.

Author

• Joe Hoover, Queen Mary University of London