The Right to the City 2 - Space and Politics

Published on the eve of the 1968 uprising, The Right to the City is, in a word, a manifesto. By proclaiming that the reality of the city is now a historical phenomenon of the past, and that a new urban reality and a new humanism are emerging within its ongoing transformation, it evokes the dialectical logic behind the Communist Manifesto's dictum, "All that is solid melts into air...". Henri Lefebvre, who would stand alongside his students at Nanterre University, where the fuse of the rebellion that would rise with the occupation of the campus and sweep across the world was lit, would see this dictum become one of the main slogans of the anti-capitalist urban movements escalating across the globe at the beginning of the 21st century.

With this second volume of the book, published in 1972, Lefebvre deepens the framework he outlined in the first volume. In France at a time when cities, as in all of Europe, were undergoing a radical spatial transformation, his articles in the journal Espaces et Sociétés, a intellectual meeting point where observations and concerns about the issue were expressed, especially "City and Urban," contain important clues that will enable us to understand the word "urban," one of the key concepts in Lefebvre's toolbox against urbanism, which he defined as an ideology in itself.