What’s left of the right to the City?

An undeniable legacy of 1968 is the proclamation of theright to the city.What happened in Paris, Prague, and many other cities, however, was merely the crystallization of long-existing conditions: even the concept was formulated earlier. Henri Lefebvre finishedThe Right to the Cityin 1967, on the centenary of volume 1 of Marx’sCapital,as Lefebvre himself noted, but it was not this temporal coincidence or the intellectual kinship that determined its significance. The concept of the right to the city came into its own with the events of 1968; it received justification in people reclaiming the streets.