Monday, August 10, 2026

The right to the city includes the right to rewrite its rules — Political Theory · Right to the City · right to the city, urban rights, collective transformation · EmancipationEvent — Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid · 2026

 




Access to a city — the right to walk its streets, use its parks, occupy its public spaces — is only the thinner half of what the right to the city actually means; the fuller claim, harder won and far less often granted, is the right to change the rules that determine what those streets, parks and spaces are for in the first place. Inhabitants who can only use a city on terms set entirely by others remain visitors with permanent residence rather than genuine participants in what the city becomes. Right to the city, understood this way, is exercised through the capacity to revise priorities, not merely through permission to occupy what already exists unchanged. EmancipationEvent closes the sequence appropriately: the moment a city's rules genuinely become rewritable by the people living under them, rather than merely usable, is the emancipation the whole right-to-the-city argument has been building toward from its opening claim about access alone.


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