The Right to the City: The Right to Live with Dignity

Abstract

The present chapter addresses Lefebvre’s famous claim to ‘The Right to the City’ by reviewing the Aristotelian concept of [Citizen] and highlighting how its main primitive semantic features have embodied, in Western societies, successive reformulations, keeping however the initial noncomprehensive character of the concept, a non-holistic view of those that inhabit the city and consequently belong to the community. Observing that from its inception the very concept is inherently associated to the notion of a physically fit, active and productive male individual, the text reflects on how this fact has determined not only the cast-off, from active social participation, all the other urban dwellers, namely the children, the elderly, the impaired, the jobless/homeless (and not so long ago the women), but has also determined the particular architectural features that cities have been assuming, throughout time, their built reality. Imagined for an idealized standard citizen, cities have always been spaces of differentiation, discrimination, exclusion, physical and psychological suffering, for a significant part of their population. This population is frequently sympathetically called ‘vulnerable’ forgetting that their vulnerability is most of the times not an inherent state or condition per se, but a consequence of the aggressiveness of a physically unsuitable urban environment, of the inexistence of proper living conditions, of the absence of basic health and social care systems, of fragile or inexistent social networks and erased affective bonds, a context that fosters segregation, exclusion and inequity. As pointed out in Urban Policies and the Right to the City [1], although there are encouraging initiatives being taken by key players in various cities and countries, there is not yet a consolidated approach to inclusive urban policy and governance. The present Covid-19 crisis has totally unveiled the fragility of contemporary urban settlements, their difficulty of response when facing a generalized crisis and the ugly reality of exclusion in our cities, even in those cities that claim to be citizen-centred, even in those that aim to be inclusive, friendly and smart. But this crisis has also shown up the role to be played by urban intelligence endowing the city with the capacity to respond to its citizens’ needs, especially in extreme situations as the one caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The key role that urban intelligence can play so that the city remains a space of freedom-respecting the citizen’s individual rights while providing comfort, care and protection to each and all its dwellers.