This key figure of French sociology embodied a militant Marxist sociology that turned its attention to everyday life, marked, according to Lefebvre, by the arrival of “modernity” in the city under the influence of the market. The debate on the right to the city was revived in the 2000s with the rediscovery of Lefebvre’s works by English-speaking specialists in cities in the Global North (Purcell 2003 Soja 2010 Marcuse 2010) whose perspectives were far removed from those outlined by Lefebvre. But in the Global South, how do public stakeholders, researchers and social movements seize this concept, interpret it and disseminate it? How can we rethink the notion of the right to the city from the standpoint of these mostly postcolonial spaces? Resurgence and reorientation These debates seem highly relevant in the Global North. The success of the right to the city is also linked to decentralization and a new division of power between central government and local authorities that support injunctions to citizen participation.
The current popularity of this notion appears to be related to a broadly shared representation whereby the city is considered to be the preferred location and scale for building a more just society. The idea of the right to the city, formulated almost 50 years ago, is one that is highly mobilised today, although it does not embody quite the same meanings as those constructed by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 work Le Droit à la ville.
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