1 THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey（1城市大卫哈维的权利）.pdf

1 THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey “CHAN GE THE WORLD ” SAID MARX; “CHAN GE LIFE ”SAID RIMBA UD; FOR US, THESE TWO TASKS ARE IDEN TI CAL (André Bretton) - (A banner in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the City of Mexico, site of the student massacre in 1968, January, 2008) We live in an era when ideals of human rights have moved center stage both politically and ethically. A lot of political energy is put into promoting, protecting and articulating their significance in the construction of a better world. For the most part the concepts circulating are individualistic and property- based and, as such , do nothing to fundamentally challenge hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logics and neoliberal modes of legality and state action. We live in a world, after all, where the rights of private property and the profit rate trump all other notions of rights one can think of. But there are occasions when the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, as when the rights of labor, women, gays and minorities come to the fore (a legacy of the long-standing labor movement and the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the United States that was collective and had a global resonance). These struggles for collective rights have, on occasion, yielded some results (such that a woman and a black become real contestants for the US Presidency). I here want to explore another kind of collective right, that of the right to the city. This is important because there is a revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre’s ideas on the topic as these were articulated in relation to the movement of ’68 in France, at the same time as there are va