Metropolitics

Dusting off the Archives: Connecting Historical Renters' Activism to Contemporary Housing-Justice Efforts

Céline Drieskens — 2025-03-05T06:00:00Z

Drawing parallels between the first renters' union in Brussels and the contemporary efforts of WUUNE, a newly formed independent renters' union, this essay advocates for community archives as one (of many) tools in the pursuit of housing justice.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle It is February 29, 2024, when I first ring the doorbell of Albert Martens' home in Schaerbeek, Brussels. The 84-year-old housing activist and sociologist invites me into his attic office, in the house he

- From the Field / housing, right to housing, right to the city, housing justice, community organizing, tenants, archives, Belgium, Brussels

The Right to the City: An Emancipating Concept?

Matthias Lecoq & translated by Oliver Waine — 2020-07-03T05:00:00Z

The radical approach formulated by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 criticized the failure to include inhabitants in the production of urban spaces. While the “right to the city” is today widely known and shared concept, Matthias Lecoq looks back on the evolution of this idea and questions its emancipatory potential.
Fifty years after it was defined by Henri Lefebvre (1968), the right to the city remains more relevant than ever. It is nevertheless necessary to update his understanding of the city,

- Essays / Lefebvre, right to the city, urban planning, inhabitant

Consent-Based Social Dancing Spaces and the Right to the City

Rebecca Krisel — 2020-06-30T05:00:00Z

Consent-based programs in social dancing venues in New York City are an initial step in supporting social dancing as the “right to the city.”
The #MeToo era has ushered in a global conversation about sexual harassment and explicit sexual consent that has spread to all facets of our society from college campuses to the film industry. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, some New York City nightlife establishments such as House of Yes in Brooklyn and Nowadays in Queens have taken the initiative

- Essays / right to the city, nightlife, New York, consent, gender, LGBTQ+, #MeToo

Right(s) to the City in Hanoi

Divya Leducq & translated by Oliver Waine — 2019-10-11T05:00:00Z

Over the past decade, urban change has accelerated and transformed the physical, social and symbolic landscapes of Hanoi. Taking as her starting point a survey in the Vietnamese capital, Divya Leducq identifies three key means in which residents express their right to the city which, in a context of multiple aspirations, reflect a shared desire for high-quality urban planning.
In recent years, urban transformation processes advocated by proponents of “top-down” planning built around

- From the Field / Hanoi, Vietnam, right to the city, inhabitant, civil society, urbanization, urban planning, urban development, social class, globalization, associations

Reclaiming the “Right to the City” Through Participatory Budgeting

Tyler James Olsen — 2019-02-19T06:00:00Z

Participatory budgeting is growing in many cities around the world. Can it become a tool for urban dwellers to reclaim power over their living conditions and the running of their city?
The crisis of legitimacy and the turn to the city
Facing the neoliberal retrenchment of the state that has been exasperated by the financial and economic troubles of the past 10 years, our representative democracies have been increasingly subject to a profound crisis of legitimacy. This, in turn, has led to

- Reviews / participation, political participation, participatory budgeting, right to the city, Lefebvre

Solidarity Economics and Rights to the Contested City in Belfast

Brendan Murtagh — 2018-12-19T06:00:00Z

Is Lefebvre's right to the city capable of extending the abstract meaning of formal “rights” to practical applications? With this question in mind, Brendan Murtagh scrutinizes a self-organization project in a neighborhood on the periphery of post-conflict Belfast in Northern Ireland.
---- Series: 50 ans après : actualités du droit à la ville d'Henri Lefebvre The wave of Occupy protests that followed the financial crisis in 2008 reinvigorated populist claims to the city, specific campaigns

- Essays / United Kingdom, autogestion, Lefebvre, solidarity, right to the city, Belfast, women, periphery, Ireland, Northern Ireland, self-organization, contested city, social economy, surplus, peace

New York's Soul for Sale: Raising the Rent on Lunch Counters and Counterculture

Benjamin Terrall — 2018-02-13T06:00:00Z

Vanishing New York is Jeremiah Moss's loving chronicle of the neighborhoods, characters, bars, and corner institutions that have disappeared in the accelerated gentrification of the last two decades. There is room to debate what we should be fighting to create, but Moss captures the New York he is fighting to preserve.
When Jeremiah Moss moved to Manhattan from rural New England in the early 1990s at the age of 22, he felt that he had already missed the greatest days of the city's existence –

- Reviews / gentrification, New York, development, displacement, right to the city, nostalgia, Bloomberg, Giuliani, counterculture

Making Their Own History: Squatters on Manhattan's Lower East Side

Benjamin H. Shepard — 2017-12-19T06:00:00Z

During the 1970s, when Manhattan's Lower East Side was full of derelict real estate, activists laid claim to left-behind buildings and vacant lots. Over time, the squatters' challenge to conventional forms of property ownership endured, though in greatly modified forms. Benjamin Shepard reviews Amy Starecheski's oral history.
Amy Starecheski's Ours to Lose is a compelling oral history of the squatting movement in the Lower East Side of New York City in the years that it moved from conflict to

- Reviews / squat, New York, right to the city, vacant lots, property rights, squatters, Lower East Side, property ownership, community gardens

The Happy Few and the Unhappy Many: Endangered Artists in Global Cities

Boris Grésillon & translated by John Barrett — 2017-06-15T07:00:00Z

While participating or having participated in reshaping urban spaces, artists seem to be increasingly driven away from city centers due to steep rents and are forced move farther and farther from the heart of metropolises. Will the global contemporary city, like the mythical figure Cronus devouring his own children, exclude its artists? Boris Grésillon examines the dynamics at work in four metropolitan centers: New York, London, Tokyo, and Paris.
The global city (Sassen 1991) is predominantly

- Essays / gentrification, Paris, London, New York, art, downtown, city centre, Tokyo, rental, right to the city, artist, arts, rent, global cities

Neighborhood Change and the Right to the City

Adam Tanaka — 2016-03-29T05:00:00Z

New York City's Stuyvesant Town is the largest housing development in Manhattan, and also one of the most controversial and most studied. Adam Tanaka reviews the latest contribution to studies of Stuyvesant Town, by Rachael A. Woldoff, Lisa M. Morrison and Michael R. Glass. Gentrification and rent deregulation have changed the composition of the development, and longtime renters now coexist with younger and wealthier households. Woldoff et al. explore this coexistence using ethnographic methods,

- Reviews / gentrification, housing, New York, rent control, ethnography, right to the city