Harvey David: Pobunjeni gradovi

David Harvey: Rebellious Cities

We live in an era where the ideals of human rights take center stage, both politically and ethically. A huge part of political energy is invested in promoting, protecting and articulating their importance in building a better world. For the most part, the concepts that circulate are individualistic and based on property, and as such do not threaten the hegemonic liberal and neoliberal market logic or the neoliberal models of legality and state action. After all, we live in a world where private property rights and profit rates supersede all other imaginable conceptions of rights. But there are circumstances in which the ideal of human rights takes a collective turn, such as when the rights of workers, women, gays and minorities come to the fore (for example, the civil rights movement that emerged in the USA in the 1960s, which was collective and had a global impact). Such struggles for collective rights periodically brought important results. Here I would like to explore another type of collective right - the right to the city in the context of the revival of interest in Henri Lefebvre's ideas on the issue, as well as the emergence of all kinds of social movements around the world that are now seeking such a right. How, then, can this right be defined? The city, as the famous urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, represents "man's most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to reconstruct the world in which he lives according to his wishes. But, if the city is a world created by man, it is the world in which he has since been condemned to live. In this way, indirectly and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, man has reconstructed himself through the construction of the city."  If Park is right, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be separated from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what kind of relationship we cherish with nature, what kind of lifestyle we long for and what aesthetic values ​​we adhere to. Hence, the right to the city is far more than the right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is the right to change and reimagine the city to an ever-increasing extent in accordance with our most sincere desires. In addition, it is a collective and not an individual right, because the reimagining of the city inevitably depends on the expression of collective power over the processes of urbanization. The freedom to build and restore ourselves and our cities is, as I would like to emphasize here, one of the most precious and yet the most neglected of our human rights. How can we express that right in the best possible way?