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The “right to the city” in the context of SA

- By Wits University

“Informal settlements and other forms of unauthorised low income dwellings in South African cities, and the struggles that are fought in their defence, are evidence of deep rooted exclusions that signal urgent attention to the realisation of city rights.”

This is according to Professor Marie Huchzermeyer from the School of Architecture and Planning in the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment who delivered an inaugural lecture on Humanism, Creativity and Rights: Invoking Henri Lefebvre’s Right to the City in the Tension Presented by Informal Settlements in South Africa Today.

In her lecture, which took place on 12 November 2013, Huchzermeyer said that while our socio-economic rights framework was a liberal one, the “right to the City” as coined by the French sociologist/philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the late 1960s stemmed from a Marxist humanism.

The literature that considers the relevance of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” for the urban condition of the 21st century largely emanates from and speaks to urban struggles in the First World or so-called “global north”. At the same time, a prominent shack dwellers’ movement in South Africa invokes an explicitly Lefebvrian right to the city in its urban struggles over the past eight years.

Huchzermeyer discussed key aspects of Lefebvre’s “right to the city”, in part contested, in relation to the field of tension that represents informal settlements in cities such as Johannesburg today and the social movements that have emerged from this tension. She focussed in particular on Lefebvre’s humanist concept of a right to the “oeuvre” or “creative work” in relation to that of “inhabiting”.

These are less explored dimensions of Lefebvre’s right to the city, but of central relevance for an engagement with informal settlements and for constructive mobilisation around the South African urban condition today.

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Listen to Huchzermeyer’s lecture.

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