Right to city

Right to city

Subject :Polity

Section : Constitution

Context:   Jahangirpuri incident violates principle of natural justice

Concept:

In In Ajay Maken vs Union of India (2019), a case concerning the legality of the demolition of Shakur Basti, the Delhi High Court held that no authority shall carry out eviction without conducting a survey, consulting the population that it seeks to evict and providing adequate rehabilitation for those eligible by invoking right to city.

The idea of the Right to the City

The “Right to the City” is an idea and a slogan that has been increasingly invoked in academic, activist and policy discourses on inclusive urbanization across the globe. It was first conceptualized by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in 1967 in the book Le Droit à la ville (The Right to the City) in which he said, “the right to the city is like a cry and a demand… a transformed and renewed right to urban life.”

According to Lefebvre, the Right to the City is the right of all urban inhabitants, not just citizens, to participate in and appropriate urban space and resources. This means that all urban inhabitants should have a role in decision-making regarding urban space and be able to access, occupy and use urban space.

The Right to the City has become a common framework for articulating alternative visions of the city and making a host of demands on issues related to urban equity and social justice. Since the adoption of the World Charter on the Right to the City in 2005, the idea has also gained a lot of traction in various international forums. It became the linchpin driving the New Urban Agenda adopted in the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) held in Quito, Ecuador in 2016. 

Though not initially conceptualized as legal right, the Right to the City is increasingly gaining recognition in law, especially in the global south with legislative instruments acknowledging this idea in countries like Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico.Brazil’s City Statute of 2001, for example, loosens the notion of individual ownership of property by privileging the social function of property over its commercial function and facilitates participatory forms of urban governance in which community groups play a key role in the planning and implementation of urban development projects.