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Sunday, July 27, 2025

The Right to the City


Urban space is framed as a field of dispute, where architecture becomes a critical practice inseparable from political struggle. Moving beyond object-based design, the text explores how architectural acts—occupations, assemblies, interventions—materialize collective desires and contest dominant urban orders. These practices do not merely represent space but produce it through situated, embodied action. Architecture, in this view, becomes a tool of resistance, pedagogy, and reappropriation. Drawing from Latin American experiences and decolonial thought, the argument emphasizes the city as a territory of commons, where insurgent subjectivities and marginal communities reconfigure urban meaning through direct engagement. Temporality, informality, and spatial dissidence are not failures of planning but expressions of alternative urban logics. The right to the city is reframed not as access to formal infrastructures but as the capacity to produce space collectively and meaningfully. This conception rejects both the neutrality of technocratic urbanism and the aestheticism of formal architecture. Instead, it affirms urban practice as a process of negotiation, memory, and imagination—where conflict is not an obstacle but the very material of democratic space. Cities are not containers of life but terrains where life is constantly reinvented through spatial action.

Espinosa, A. (2022). ‘Arquitetura, práxis e conflito: Por uma política do espaço urbano’. Cadernos Metrópole, 24(53), 373–395.