The Right to the City: a Right to Have Rights?

In this paper I propose to conceive the right to the city as a right to have rights. With this expression I will refer not only to Arendt’s idea but also to its recent use in legal and political scholarship, as by Rodotà and Balibar, that link it to dignity and citizenship. Due to its vagueness, the right to the city has been defined in very different ways and there is widespread debate on what the right to the city is and what should include. To test the hypothesis I will: 1) briefly review the idea in Lefebvre’s original formulation; 2) reconstruct how the right to the city has been described in the – few – approaches to it as a legal right (Attoh, Auby); 3) analyze how the right to the city has been enshrined in legislation and soft law documents; 4) explore how the idea of the right to the city as a right to have rights can fit into the present use of it in critical urban studies literature. In the conclusion of the paper I argue for a conception of the right to the city as inclusive right, a foundation of urban democracy and citizenship. I also argue that such a conception of the right to the city will not diminish its critical potential