What does the "right to the city" entail?  What (exactly) did Lefebvre propose?  Is there room for "limited rights to the city?" that both provides institutionalization AND respects Lefebvre's concerns? (or does it have to be "one or the other" with no compromises?)

Lefebvre observed the city on the bank of it (from the countryside). Rights are not limited to the city. There is a totality. However, the "right to the city", in the strict conception of Lefebvre, is a political-philosophical project under construction (a utopia, if you prefer). In addition, the author criticizes the technicist urbanism that stands (one that lends itself to the reproduction of urban space under the logic of capital). The notion of the right to the city is not a right to be provided by the State, nor by the law itself (which comes ultimately from the State). Therefore, there is a risk in the institutionalization of the conception of right to the city. On the other hand, this conception loses the practical (application) sense. Is it prudent to understand this concept only as a utopia or the institutionalization of the right to the city can contribute to change the logic of reproduction of urban space today?

The spirit of the right to the city resides within the rhythms and patterns of everyday life, institutionalising them into the management of urban space can be pursued through a nuanced appreciation of the 'spatial triad' that sits at the heart of the 'production of space'. The arrythmia inherent in urban management systems results from a skewed managerialism in the representations of space dominated by architects and designers working to fulfill a limited understanding of 'mixed use' which does not appreciate the dynamics of how space is actually used by humans in unpredictable ways - they design spaces to be managed for limited uses - i.e. commercially viable uses, such as sponsored events taking over public space, turning the public spaces of the city into rentable amenity space whereby the unpredictable publicness of the spaces is rendered unnacceptable, even illegal by byelaws which criminalise activities that are not conducive to the orderly flow of capital (i.e. skateboarding teenagers etc.). This is equally reflected in the prioritisation of cheap build housing over sustainable housing being built in disaster prone areas, cost efficiency for profit trumps social responsibility and accountability in almost all urban planning and management practices. This means the right to the city is not institutionalised in governance, it is lived rebelliously in the spaces inbetween (i.e. in spatial practices), and this imbalance is at the rotten heart of government. The binds that constrain the right to the city are not built into the uses the city is put to but to the design and management principles of capital oriented utilitarianism, where efficiency and growth are more influential than public welfare. You can see examples of this in work by Mitchell on Chicago 'Peoples Park', some of my own earlier work on Newcastle upon Tyne (less sexy perhaps but equally valid case studies), but this critique is implicit in much of the geography of public spaces. The risk of embedding the right to the city is not from its conception, but from the threat is poses to capital oriented managerialism.

Dear Peter, I thank you very much for your attention and for your notes. Thanks for pointing out the material. Thanks also to Mr. William. I'll follow up on your works. I would like to propose two other questions on the subject: 1 - If the right to the city is not compatible with the institutionalization, would there be ideological legitimacy in the social movements that use the right to the city as a flag of their claims for rights IN THE city? 2. Does the right to the city, inserted in international treaties and in the legal order of some countries, have any meaning in the expression of the right to the city of Lefebvre?

For Henri Lefebvre: "The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: the right to freedom, to individualism in socialization, to habitat and dwelling. The right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation (clearly distinct from the right to property), are implied in the right to the city." (See Lefebvre, H. 1968. Le Droit à la Ville, in Kofman, E. and Lebas, E., eds and translators. 1996. Writings on Cities, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing.)

Lest we forget, Lefebvre was a Marxist philosopher and sociologist who looked at relations of center and periphery, including the technocracy that arbiters these. But, where he saw the need for transformed and renewed "access" to urban life, his pioneering concept of the Right to the City has taken on a wide range of meanings depending on what banner social movements, interest groups, and the locally discontented brandish.

In the late-1960s, when Lefebrve published his most famous work, the world population was about 3.4 billion, of which one-third was urbanized. Now, more than half of the world's population of about 7.4 billion lives in urban areas. By 2050, the world's urban population will have risen to 6.5 billion people—two-thirds of all humanity. The rapid growth of cities in the developing world, coupled with increasing rural to urban migration, explains this. It has led to a boom in megacities, meaning, agglomerations that host 10 million inhabitants or more. (In 1990, there were 10 megacities; in 2014, there were 28.)

Extreme poverty is concentrated in urban spaces and slums are the world's fastest growing habitat. While national and city governments in the developing and emerging world struggle to accommodate rising populations, the urban imperative—as SDG 11 of the recently-approved Sustainable Development Goals frames it—is to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable. This means ensuring access to safe and affordable housing and upgrading slum settlements. It also involves investing in public transport, creating green public spaces, and improving urban planning and management in a way that is both participatory and inclusive. No one could possibly disagree, for sure, but the challenges boggle the mind. Density, size, and diversity, the defining features of cities, provide the basic elements for conflict to continue swelling. To maintain order and power, authorities will formulate strategies and tactics to "manage" the ebbs and flows of contentious cries and demand.

In these conditions, anyone who is involved in the day-to-day practice of urban design and planning under the aegis of urban politics may cast deprecatory asides at Lefebvre's Right to the City and say it is too impossibly utopian to be of any use. And yet, Lefebvre did not equate the urban with urbanization but—and this in very anticipatory tune with the Sustainable Development Goals—as a society beyond capitalism, a society characterized by meaningful engagement among inhabitants embedded in a web of social connections. Listening to him, the urban is thus what one might term a possible world: a society yet to come. After all, the central idea is that the Right to the City entails the capacity to remake ourselves by remaking cities, ideally somewhere between contention and control. One should not blame Lefebvre—nor the Right to City movement—for rapid urbanization (surely, from the vantage point of the 1960s, he could not have predicted the location and pace of that). On the contrary, however, there is reason to revisit Lefebvre's still-relevant concept to better understand the contemporary city; certainly, it would not hurt to try.

Henri Lefebvre emphasised that in human society all 'space is social: it involves assigning more or less appropriated places to social relations....social space has thus always been a social product'.

This has been a creative understanding enabling the right to the social space in cities.