Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City is not merely a theoretical text—it is a political declaration, a call to reimagine urban life as a terrain of emancipation rather than commodification. Written during the centenary of Marx’s Capital, the book critiques the alienation of everyday life in mid-20th-century cities and proposes an alternative: reclaiming urban space as a site of use-value, not exchange-value. Lefebvre confronts the fetishism of commodified space by insisting on the centrality of lived time, affect, and collective creativity. Rather than replacing one system with another, he opens pathways for thinking and acting toward urban futures rooted in difference, pleasure, and autonomy. The work anticipates key dynamics of contemporary urban conflict, including gentrification, displacement, and speculative development, offering not definitive solutions but a critical methodology and a vocabulary for political intervention. An exemplary insight is his opposition between the city as a site of consumption versus the city as a space of becoming, where inhabitants do not merely reside but transform both space and self in a dialectic of mutual production. This vision continues to inspire movements that see the city not only as the locus of struggle but as the medium through which a more just and joyful society might be built.
Iglesias Costa, M., 2017. El derecho a la ciudad como reclamo de la vida urbana. Reseña de Henri Lefebvre (2017) El derecho a la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.129–132.
