Category Archives: The Right to the City

Lefèbvre and the periphery: an interview with professor Marie Huchzermeyer

This interview provides a short introduction to some relevant but usually dismissed debates regarding the relationship between Lefèbvre’s oeuvre and peripheral/semi-peripheral regions of the world. By talking about some parallels between South African and Brazilian uses of Lefèbvrian concepts, on the one hand, and about Lefèbvre’s use of the reality of Latin American favelas to develop his own concepts, Professor Marie Huchzermeyer proposes challenges to the established scholar Anglophone view on the role of legal rights in the quest for the ‘right to city’. She alternatively points towards a bottom-up reading of the ‘right to the city’ that goes beyond the famous ‘far and cry’ claim, highlighting the importance of institutional advancements as a means within the Lefèbvrian framework for social change.

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Lefèbvre and the periphery: an interview with Marie Huchzermeyer

Democracy in Africa: The right to the city – a theory, a slogan, a politics of everyday life

http://democracyinafrica.org/right-city-theory-slogan-politics-everyday-life/

Last week, Professor Marie Huchzermeyer gave her inaugural lecture at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she is a professor in the School of Architecture and Planning. Her lecture explored the concept of the ‘Right to the City’ as it appeared in the work of Henri Lefebvre and as it appears in the everyday life and politics of shack dwellers in South Africa. The blog includes a link to a PDF and audio file of her original lecture.

In South Africa and in many former colonial countries, the struggle for a right to the city formed an integral part of the fight against colonialism and apartheid. However, the political transitions that followed did not resolve these struggles: As exclusionary legislation was finally repealed, market forces and (more recently) the relentless drive to attract global investors have been barring the poor from living and making a livelihood in the city, and from having any meaningful involvement in shaping it.

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Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

http://www.wits.ac.za/files/dc2pg_333996001384340616.pdf

Marie Huchzermeyer

Inaugural Lecture, School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, 12 November, 2013

The reality of informal settlements and other forms of unauthorized low income dwelling in South African cities, and the frustrations that manifest in street blockades or targeted disruptions to the functioning of the city, are evidence of deep rooted exclusions that signal urgent attention to the realization of city rights. While our socio-economic rights framework is a liberal one, the ‘right to the city’ as coined by the French sociologist/philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the late 1960s stems from a Marxist humanism. The literature that considers the relevance of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ for the urban condition of the 21st century largely emanates from and speaks to urban struggles in the First World or so-called ‘global north’. At the same time, a prominent shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa invokes an explicitly Lefebvrian right to the city in its urban struggles over the past eight years. In this lecture, I discuss key aspects of Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, in part contested, in relation to the field of tension that represents informal settlements in cities such as Johannesburg today and the social movements that have emerged from this tension. I focus in particular on Lefebvre’s humanist concept of a right to the ‘oeuvre’ or ‘creative work’ in relation to that of ‘inhabiting’. These are less explored dimensions of Lefebvre’s right to the city, but of central relevance for an engagement with informal settlements and for constructive mobilization around the South African urban condition today.

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Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Prof. Huchzermeyer's Talk in 'Transformation'

David Harvey’s Rebel Cities reviewed by Aaron Schneider

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2013/877

David Harvey’s Rebel Cities is a call to arms. If Marx’s Communist Manifesto offered a call to arms for the uprisings of 1848, Rebel Cities coincides with a diversity of contemporary uprisings from Alto (in Bolivia) to Zuccotti Park (in New York). These diverse sites of uprising in developed and undeveloped, historical and contemporary sites offer lessons about urban movements with a principled commitment to democratic and anti-capitalist alternatives. Rebel Cities seeks to “engage with, but also create an alternative to, the capitalist laws of value determination,” through an “anti-wealth politics” and “construction of alternative social relations,” with a “material but also a spiritual and moral” shift to ecological sustainability and “the abolition of the dominant class relation that underpins and mandates the perpetual expansion of surplus value production and relation” (126-8). The following paragraphs will take up the core elements of Rebel Cities’ argument: urban, precariat, and democratic anti-capitalism, and end with some observations about the politics of struggle laid out in Rebel Cities.

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Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Humanism, creativity and rights: invoking Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city in the tension presented by informal settlements in South Africa today

Presented by Professor Marie Huchzermeyer

Date: Tuesday, 12 November 2013
Time: 17h30 for 18h00
Venue: Dorothy Susskind Auditorium, John Moffat Building, East Campus, Wits
Chair: DVC: Advancement and Partnerships, Prof Rob Moore
Vote of thanks: Professor Alison Todes, followed by refreshments in the John Moffat foyer

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