Between equal rights force decides? : Contested place-making and the right to the city

Abstract

This paper presents a sympathetic critique of a right to the city perspective that sets up a binary between city inhabitants who actively produce and appropriate city space for its use value as opposed to those who expropriate urban space for realizing exchange value. It suggests that this tends to gloss over the actual divisions among users of city space and their complicity with forces of capital and the state that constitute real limits for the urban revolution that the right to the city envisions. It then argues that an analytics of contested place-making, including practices of commoning, can both include the central conflict that is important to the rights to the city perspective and overcome the limitations of a rights framework.