Book Review: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-489
Author(s):  
John Zarobell
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

scholarly journals Towards a spatialized utopia: romanticism and everyday life in the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
César Simoni Santos
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
Revolutionary Romanticism ◽  
Practical Program ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City ◽  
Spatial Element

The presence of the spatial element in the reflections of Henri Lefebvre does not merely result from work involving the translation and adaptation of critical thinking developed up until his time. The realization that not even the highest expression of the critical tradition had sufficiently noticed this crucial dimension of life was one of the connecting points between theoretical advance, represented by the spatial orientation of critique, and the effort to renew the utopian horizon. A very distinct assimilation of the early work of Marx and the proximity to revolutionary romanticism, particularly of Nietzschean extraction, rendered a decisive impact on Lefebvrian conception. Practice, body, pleasure and instincts, recovering their place in the critical social imagination, went on to become the basis for the re-foundation of a theoretical-practical program that involved the formulation of the notion of the right to the city. The perspective of appropriation thus replaced the vague emancipatory statements of the subject's philosophies.

scholarly journals Improvising “Nonexistent Rights”: Immigrants, Ethnic Restaurants, and Corporeal Citizenship in Suburban California

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 79-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles T. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Right To The City ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
City Life ◽  
Urban Citizenship ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Right ◽  
Neoliberal Restructuring ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
The City

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s radical concept of “right to the city,” contemporary literatures on urban citizenship critically shift the locus of citizenship from its juridical-political foundation in the sovereign state to the spatial politics of the urban inhabitants. However, while the political discourse of right to the city presents a vital vision for urban democracy in the shadow of neoliberal restructuring, its exclusive focus on democratic agency and practices can become disconnected from the everyday experiences of city life on the ground. In fact, in cities that lack longstanding/viable urban citizenship mechanisms that can deliver meaningful political participation, excluded subjects may bypass formal democratic channels to improvise their own inclusion, belonging, and rights in an informal space that the sovereign power does not recognize. Drawing on my fieldwork in the Asian restaurant industry in several multiethnic suburbs in Southern California, this article investigates how immigrant restaurant entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers engender a set of “nonexistent rights” through their everyday production and consumption of ethnic food. I name this improvisational political ensemble corporeal citizenship to describe the material, affective, and bodily dimensions of inclusion, belonging, and “rights” that immigrants actualize through their everyday participation in this suburban ethnic culinary commerce. For many immigrants operating in the global circuits of neoliberal capitalism, citizenship no longer just means what Hannah Arendt (1951) once suggested as “the right to have rights,” or what Engin Isin and Peter Nyers (2014) reformulate as “the right to claim rights,” but also the right to reinvent ways of claiming rights. I suggest such improvisation of nonexistent rights has surprising political implications for unorthodox ways of advancing democratic transformation.

scholarly journals The urban public sector as commons

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 125-127
Author(s):  
Jane Collins
Keyword(s):  
Public Sector ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Common Property ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Urban Settings ◽  
Collective Property ◽  
The Right ◽  
Urban Commons ◽  
The City

Susser and Tonnelat’s article on the three urban commons is both visionary and heartening. Its counterpastoral polemic glorifies urban modes of sociality and the forms of common property fostered by urban life. The authors find in cities communities of experience that cross class lines and create inadvertent coalitions around shared problems. They argue that specific components of what has been called “the right to the city” need to be understood as “commons”—collective property that is neither fully public nor private but shared by individuals as they go about everyday life in urban settings.

Henri Lefebvre

Urban Studies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Zieleniec
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Social Production ◽  
Henri Lefebvre ◽  
Production Of Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Right ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

Henri Lefebvre is now established as one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century. Over a long life (b. 1901–d. 1991) he wrote and published prodigiously more than sixty books and several hundred articles on a range of issues and themes. His legacy and lasting impact not only includes being the most influential and seminal theorist on the reprioritization of space in social and critical analysis but also recognition for his contribution to the analysis of everyday life, modernity, the Right to the City, and the urban. He continues to influence and inspire research across a number of disciplines and fields; these include rural and regional studies, sociology, geography, politics, philosophy, and urban studies. Lefebvre’s commitment Marxism; his nondogmatic and humanist approach to the definition, discussion, extension, and application of key concepts; and his integration of those concepts into his various analyses of the rural and the city, of the state, of space and politics, and of modernity and everyday life led him to a conflicted relationship and at times marginalization within the structuralist-influenced French Academy and the Communist Party of France in which he was a member for thirty years. His anti-Stalinist stance and nonconformist opposition to the structural determinism prevalent within the party led to his expulsion, but throughout the 1960s, as professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and latterly at the new university at Nanterre, he became one of the most respected teachers and intellectuals inspiring and influencing the May 1968 student revolt. Lefebvre’s work after that, still influenced and committed to Marxist dialectics and critique, increasingly focused on the urban, the social production of space, everyday life, modernity, and the survival of capitalism. Of these his introduction of the concept of the right to the city and the social production of space have been immensely influential for a range of urban scholars and theorists and his work as a whole is being increasingly adopted, adapted, and extended by a variety of researchers of the city in a range of disciplines. The works selected below reflect Lefebvre’s long career and extensive corpus of work. However, only those books and articles that have been translated into English are included here. They represent his exegesis of Marxism and its application to a range of themes that were applied or are important for urban analysis. The secondary literature cited is organized thematically and while not comprehensive provides an overview of the expanding literature on, about, and applying Lefebvrian analysis.

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