The Vortex of Rights: 'Right to the City' at a Crossroads

Date

2013-05-01

Author

Kuymulu, Mehmet Barış

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

247
views

0
downloads

The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide-ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre's formulation of the right to the city - based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism - is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre's lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre's own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.

Subject Keywords

Development, Sociology and Political Science, Urban Studies

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/39256

Journal

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12008

Collections

Department of Sociology, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Continuity and Change in Public Policy: Redistribution, Exclusion and State Rescaling in Turkey Bayırbağ, Mustafa Kemal (Wiley, 2013-07-01) This article discusses potential reasons for the continuities in the broader policy agendas of capitalist states, despite radical shifts in economic policies, by employing the state-rescaling framework. Its main thrust is that, even though centrally designed policy programs mainly aim to give direction to the dynamics of the market economy, the institutional (re)structuring needed to operationalize such policy measures has been shaped around a politics of redistribution, a product both of the exclusionary r...
Globalization, Governance, and the Emergence of Indigenous Autonomy Movements in Latin America: The Case of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua Baracco, Luciano (SAGE Publications, 2018-11-01) A revisiting of Salvador Marti i Puig's approach to globalization and the turn toward governance in explaining the roots and impact of the political mobilization of Latin America's indigenous peoples since the 1990s recasts governance as a disciplinary regime that in the case of Nicaragua co-opted potentially radical oppositional movements into the neoliberal project that accompanied Latin America's democratic transition. The discussion takes as its empirical case the autonomy process on Nicaragua's Caribbe...
The decline of community-based solidarity among the urban poor: the case of Bostancık Neighbourhood in Ankara Tanış, Duygu; Şengül, Hüseyin Tarık; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2009) This thesis concentrates on the effects of poverty and socio-spatial exclusion on the local communities and the solidarity ties among the poor. The field research conducted in Bostancık Neighbourhood revolved around two basic questions; socio-spatial segregation of the poor communities from the wider society and the impact of this on the internal structure of these communities with special reference to the solidarity ties and networks. The findings of the research show that the urban poor have been excluded...
The making of a 'city of culture' : restructuring Antalya Varlı-Görk, Reyhan; Nalbantoğlu, Hasan Ünal; Department of Sociology (2010) This study tries to identify agencies’ strategies in the ‘urban restructuring’ of Antalya into a ‘city of culture’ by examining the underlying relation between urban cultural policies and global capitalism. Pursuing the relational thinking of the Marxist urban political economy paradigm, the theoretical frames for the concepts of ‘restructuring’ and ‘city of culture’ were investigated using multi-dimensional approaches of existing scholarly literature. Since the concept ‘city of culture’ involves growth ori...
The Political construction of urban development projects: The Political construction of urban development projects : the case of İzmir Penpecioğlu, Mehmet; Keskinok, Hüseyin Çağatay; Department of Urban Policy Planning and Local Governments (2012) Urban Development Projects (UDPs) have become hegemonic projects of redefining urban political priorities. The political construction of UDPs could not only be investigated through analyzing capital accumulation processes. To reveal how UDPs are politically constructed, this thesis investigates how governmental and non-governmental agents form a hegemonic block to mobilize hegemonic discursive practices and coercive-legislative mechanisms in the formation of UDPs. A Lefebvrian-inspired neo-Gramscian theoret...

Citation Formats

M. B. Kuymulu, “The Vortex of Rights: ‘Right to the City’ at a Crossroads,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, pp. 923–940, 2013, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/39256.