The Right to the City

The right to the city is a widely used concept since the 1970s. This chapter seeks to recover the historical dimension of the term and the struggle for its implementation, presented by way of the Brazilian experience, a country with extreme social inequality. However, and possibly because of these inequalities, Brazil can offer important experiences of social organisation in cities. The chapter is structured in four parts. Firstly, I briefly present the concept of “Right to the City” as coined by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 and later developed by David Harvey in 2008. The second part introduces the World Charter for the Right to the City elaborated from a great articulation of organised social movements gathered in the Social Forum of the Americas (Quito, Ecuador, July 2004), World Urban Forum (Barcelona, Spain, September 2004) and the V World Social Forum (Porto Alegre, Brazil, January 2005). Thirdly, I introduce the urban reform as the Brazilian experience, with the incorporation of the idea of the right to the city as a central agenda of organised social movements, its incorporation into the national urban legislation and its recent developments. Fourthly and in conclusion, I seek to advance the debate on how to guarantee the realisation of the right to the city in broad and democratic ways, discussing the limitations of global documents and the value of developing a better understanding of local cases and their experiences.