From the 'right to the city' to the right to the planet

Marcelo Lopes de Souza

City, 2015, vol. 19, issue 4, 408-443

Abstract: The debate on emancipatory socio-spatial change can be by no means only a matter of 'right to the city' - not even within the framework of the Lefebvrian concept of 'the urban' ( l'urbain ), whose scope is wider than is usual. I believe this implies meeting the challenges of reflecting deeper and with more sophistication on how to practically overcome the following aspects of reality: 1) the state apparatus and statism (be it properly capitalist or 'socialist') as well as the institution called 'political party' and all hierarchical, bureaucratic and vertical modes of collective organisation; 2) the technological matrix and the spatiality inherited from capitalism; 3) the capitalist ideology of 'economic development' (somewhat shared, albeit in a distinct and recontextualised way, by typical Marxism with its economism and productivism), full of economistic, Eurocentric, teleological and rationalist presuppositions. At the end of the day, what is at stake is the right to the planet, which requires rethinking a number of issues regarding spatial organisation (pointing out the necessary, radical economic-spatial deconcentration and territorial decentralisation, but without degenerating into parochial localism and self-insulating economic processes), the social division of labour, exploitation and alienation (in the context of which the trends of deterioration and regression such as labour precarisation and 'hyperprecarisation' should be highlighted), ethnocentrism (in this regard its renewed facets relating to xenophobia, nationalism and racism must be vehemently denounced), the various types of oppression (class, gender, etc.) and heteronomy in general - all this ultimately examined and judged on the basis of autonomy in the strong sense as the crucial parameter of analysis and evaluation.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1051719

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