City Right

For the first time in human history, the number of people living in cities far outnumbers those living in rural areas, and the struggles and problems in cities have become prominent to an unprecedented extent in world history. Henri Lefebvre's "The Right to the City" has also increasingly become a fundamental slogan and idea of a struggle since its publication in 1968.

In this first volume of his in-depth work, Lefebvre demonstrates that the new reality formed under the name of the city means the end of the industrial city and its fragmentation into peripheries and suburbs. He also reveals that the capitalist production of urban space is determined by exchange value rather than use value, and consequently, classes that do not own capital and property, and cannot profit from the exchange value of spaces, lose their say over the city.

In our current era, where a fundamental political struggle axis has emerged, centered on the re-appropriation of the right to the city by the urban dispossessed through collective interventions in the political and economic processes that re-produce the city, "a just and livable right to the city" has become a fundamental slogan for peoples around the world fighting to protect their living spaces, and it has become one of the main axes of the anti-capitalist struggle. "The Right to the City" has become one of the reference texts that thinkers and activists from all fields, from politics to sociology, from art to philosophy and science, who are directly or indirectly involved in this struggle, will inevitably return to.

As one of the pioneering thinkers who changed the perception of the city in the history of thought and created a new awareness, Lefebvre's inspiring and foundational text is a fundamental work that deserves to be at the center of designs for the right to the city, the right to urban life, and a new humanism and democracy.