In his first inception of the concept, Lefebvre paid specific emphasis on the effects that capitalism had over “the city”, whereby urban life was downgraded into a commodity, social interaction became increasingly uprooted and urban space and governance were turned into exclusive goods. In opposition to this trend, Lefevbre called to “rescue the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built” and to transform urban space into “a meeting point for building collective life”. Due to the inequalities produced by the rapid increase of world urban population in most regions of the world, the concept of the right to the city has been recalled on several occasions since the publication of Lefevbre’s book as a call to action by social movements and grassroots organizations. In their appeal for “their right to the city”, local mobilizations around the world usually refer to their struggle for social justice and dignified access to urban life to face growing urban inequalities. The right to the city has had a particular influence in Latin America and Europe, where social movements have particularly appealed to the concept in their actions and promoted local instruments for advancing its concrete understanding in terms of policy-making at the local and even national level. A good proof on how the notion of right to the city has gained international recognition in the last years could be seen in the United Nations Habitat III process, and how the New Urban Agenda recognized the concept as the vision of “cities for all”. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand... a transformed and renewed access to urban life". David Harvey described it as follows:
Recent popular movements
A number of popular movements, such as the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, the Right to the City Alliance in the United States, Recht auf Stadt, a network of squatters, tenants and artists in Hamburg, and various movements in Asia and Latin America, have incorporated the idea of the right to the city into their struggles. In Brazil the 2001 City Statute wrote the Right to the City into federal law. More recently, scholars have proposed a 'Digital Right to the City', which involves thinking about the city as not just bricks and mortar, but also digital code and information.
The urban form of cities is gendered, and feminist scholars have argued that the right to the city needs to be understood in gendered terms. For instance in São Paulo, one in every three women over the age of 16 has experienced some sort of sexual violence. In New Delhi, women are afraid of using the public transportation system because of the threat of rape.
Criticism
The growing popularity of the concept has nonetheless raised some criticism and concerns on how the original vision of Henri Lefevbre could be reduced to a “citizenship vision”, focused on the mere implementation of social and economic rights in the city leaving aside its transformatory nature and the concept of social conflict behind the original concept. Marcelo Lopes de Souza has for instance argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "the price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre's concept" and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.
