Publication: The right to the city in times of biopolitics – tactical urbanism in a transition program
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Date
2017
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AESOP
Abstract
The city is the greatest field of action of capitalism, but also the most possible field of resistance to it. Capitalism and urbanization feedback in a process where the former is always expanding, producing and concentrating geographically and socially its surplus in the city. Harvey (2014) points out that to think of an alternative form of urbanization, it is necessary to build possibilities for an anti-capitalist turn, thus pointing to the urgency of recognizing the common and its potency. And it suggests that this route of escape must start from a convergence between the microcosm of the body and the macro space of globalization, two important topics of the current neoliberal phase of capitalism. This convergence can be achieved in the affirmation of human and individual rights, a perspective that reinforces the importance of the concept of the right to the city, developed in the 1960s by Lefebvre (2016). A more collective right than individual, which encompasses all other human rights, claiming the participation of all in the construction and use of space and urban life. Thinking about the global world has made it possible to recognize a common world with which to worry, to produce, to appropriate, and which is shared by all. For Hardt & Negri (2016), the idea of 'common' was also potentialized with the understanding of the concept of biopolitics, whose subjectivities will always be produced by apparatus of power, whether of the sovereignty of the Empire or the resistance of the multitude. Thus, the 'right to the city' is considered as a strategy of transition from the current urban situation of the cities towards a situation of justice, of full realization of the common well-being. For the institutional redesign, necessary for this transition, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2003) argues that, besides state and formal law, the forms of informal and unofficial law that he attributes to 'subaltern cosmopolitan legality' must also be considered. And to avoid wasting social experiences that seek to declare and exercise the rights that matter to them.
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Book of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017
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