Photograph by Sadia Marium.

The “right to the city” has become a rallying call for social movements worldwide [1]. While the slogan serves as a generic container for a variety of issues that might otherwise go ignored, its origins pertain to a certain idea of revolutionary politics. More than symbolic negation, the right to the city was originally meant to signify an ongoing struggle at the level of everyday life. As such, the terms of the right to the city must be continuously renewed, today in regard to the advanced technical infrastructures that shape everyday life, in cities and beyond.

Philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefebvre (1901–91) defined the right to the city as something “like a cry and a demand”—not as a liberal-democratic right or a reactionary return to traditional cities, but as a right that “can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life” (emphasis in original) [2]. Lefebvre introduced this idea in his 1967 essay Le droit à la ville (The Right to the City), in which he described the right to the city as part of a wider revolutionary struggle against capitalism and ultimately the state [3]. The political-economic system’s inherent tendency towards the production of alienation was becoming more and more vivid in the functionalist schemes of Modernist urban planners, specifically those in Paris and at the newly completed university campus in Nanterre, where he taught, which stood in stark contrast to preexisting shanty towns next door [4]. In the midst of the 1968 student protests in France, which resounded in uprisings around the world, Lefebvre began, with his work The Urban Revolution, theorizing the complete urbanization of society [5].

Fifty years since May 1968, Lefebvre’s hypothesis of total urbanization resonates even more substantially, as a majority of the world’s population are now reported to live in urban areas [6]. Yet, at the same time, 46% of the world’s 7.4 billion population remains in rural areas, with a subsequent 1.2 billion people lacking access to electricity [7]. Urbanization still touches them, either directly through labor––in such industries as agriculture and mining––or through ecological devastation catalyzed by technologically-induced environmental destruction and climate change. Following Lefebvre, “the urban” therefore should not be interpreted as an exclusive feature of cities, but indeed as a transformation of the rural; not only as “the city,” but moreover as an ongoing process of urbanization [8].

Meanwhile, new technological dependencies reinforce existing socioeconomic disparities among city-dwellers. Dhaka, Bangladesh, and, in particular, the self-organized settlement Karail Basti depicted in Sadia Marium’s photo series titled “Noise,” serves as one example of the relations produced through the technological determination of urban space. Home to nearly 120,000 people living in extreme proximity—urban poor displaced by developments or evicted from other settlements, rural poor escaping poverty and natural disasters in the countryside—Karail Basti, as an “illegal” settlement, is contingent on improvised relationships with water and electricity providers and, for lack of registered postal addresses, the use of mobile phone payment systems [9]. At the same time, the settlement is plagued by man-made fires that destroy not only homes, but entire livelihoods. With regard to the postcolonial context, Elisa T. Bertuzzo writes, “Creolized technologies can serve individuals and collectives entertaining dynamic relations in social space [like those of Karail Basti’s inhabitants], but are as well at the disposal of regimes of power pursuing a limitation of these same dynamics” [10]. The right to the city in this updated context, in Dhaka and beyond, thus demands renewal for an urbanizing world marked not only by pervasive technologies, but also by extreme inequality within and beyond cities.

When considered foremost in relation to urban infrastructures, the right to the city resists being reduced

Rather than “an informational right to the city” or “digital rights to the city,” as some have proposed [11], Lefebvre’s right should be retooled for contemporary urbanism as “the user’s right to the city.” Inserting the word “user” underscores the subjectivity produced in relation to technical infrastructures, which is different from that produced in relation to the nation state—a subjective position that sociologist and design theorist Benjamin Bratton has defined as the “user-subject” [12]. When considered foremost in relation to urban infrastructures, the right to the city resists being reduced to a liberal-democratic right and acknowledges that sovereignty is shifting from the preceding domain of nation states, or Westphalian territorial “loops,” toward extrastate platforms hosted by an expansive global network of computational machines, both virtual and physical, the “accidental megastructure” Bratton calls “The Stack” [13]. All of urban life—including city-dwellers, rural populations affected by urbanization, as well as other nonhuman lifeforms—comes to inhabit a subjective position as “user” in relation to the technical infrastructures needed at the very least for survival. The design, construction, and maintenance of those infrastructures, today carried out within capitalist relations, though not necessarily, become the tasks of urban society.

In a late essay titled “From the Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship,” Lefebvre argued for the addition of six new rights to be engaged in the struggle for “the right to the city,” including the right to information and the right to services [14]. Lefebvre’s contract is positioned as a point of departure for initiatives, ideas, and interpretations around the idea of stipulated, contractual citizenship, which in turn is intended to foster a renewal of political life, a movement with “historical roots”—what he earlier designated as “a permanent cultural revolution” [15/16].  In some ways, responses to Lefebvre’s “New Contract” can be seen less in the end-user license agreements imposed by centralized platforms and more in the so-called “smart contracts” enabled by decentralized computation (which, importantly, does not equal decentralized power). Yet rather than a literal contract in any physical or virtual form, Lefebvre’s contract engenders a link between citoyenneté (citizenship) and citadinneté––a neologism that translates to the position of “being a city-dweller”––a link that becomes inevitable in societies undergoing urbanization [17].

Comparatively, Bratton’s model of The Stack does not rule out the possibility of stipulated, contractual citizenship, but it sees formal, national citizenship as already subsumed by the computational logic of platforms, “a third institutional form, along with states and markets,” which operate at multiple discrete layers of a planetary totality [18]. Conceptualized like a software stack, The Stack’s six layers—Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, and User—are connected when users—“animal, vegetable, or mineral”—activate informational “columns” that travel from the User layer all the way down to the Earth layer and back up again in a U-shaped trajectory [19]. The City layer makes all humans into inhabitants of a “composite urban territory,” where people are less political subjects of one particular city or state but rather of the City, the “globally uneven mesh of amalgamated infrastructures and delaminated jurisdictions” [20]. Although Bratton refrains from explicitly referencing Lefebvre’s theory of “complete urbanization,” its reflection in the omnipresent City layer is apparent. Within the framework of Lefebvre’s theory, in recognition of the interdependencies between urban and rural spaces, and in concert with the City layer’s single distributed urbanism, one could formulate another hypothesis: everyone is, in one way or another, a citadin (city-dweller), though not necessarily a citizen—and therefore also a user.

Everyone is, in one way or another, a citadin (city-dweller), though not necessarily a citizen—and therefore also a user.

While the citadin coincides with a model of social reality tied to human experience and the corporeality of struggle, Bratton’s user-subject of The Stack coincides with a model of reality based on computation, which flattens all users (human or nonhuman) onto the same operative and subjective level. According to Bratton, who addresses Lefebvre only in passing, the terms of the right to the city “are as uncertain as the convoluted control structures of the City layer against which the notion maneuvers” [21]. He asks: “To what extent does the City have a corresponding ‘right’ to use the User for its own creative purposes?” [22] Instead of the city only existing “for us,” the question is also how we exist “for it.” As human users inhabit the city and navigate its infrastructures, it generates user profiles about us, making us making us readable for the city's multitude of machines. Furthermore, the computational city is capable of addressing virtually unlimited everyday objects—things, relations, and processes—for its own technical purposes, setting off chain reactions that exceed any one legal jurisdiction. So, inevitably, the user’s right to the city also depends on the user’s ability to stipulate (or design) the terms of the city’s right to the user.

An extension of Lefebvre’s right to the city, the user’s right to the city is the strategic right of individuals and groups to garner real control over their relations to infrastructure. This right does not come about organically or automatically: it necessitates a tactical protocol to be designed responsively into infrastructures themselves in a mode that at once prevents the centralization of infrastructural power, and also recognizes the site-specificity of each infrastructure and its users. It depends not only on individuals’ or groups’ right to determine their relations to infrastructure, but it also depends on deliberate design interventions in the infrastructures whose relations users desire to shape. Like The Stack, the user’s right to the city is, in a way, is a design brief, both for city-dwellers who appropriate urban spaces, as well as for designers who might provide greater accountability and establish new forms of platform sovereignty for other users who may otherwise have none.

What role, then, do architects have to play in the user’s right to the city? While Lefebvre was critical of architects for their general complicity in social domination and determination, he admired utopian projects like Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon and Ricardo Bofill’s City in Space [23]. Indeed, thinking with Lefebvre cannot be done without thinking with and about “Utopia” as a means to surpass the constraints of the present [24]. With this in mind, Lefebvre’s notion of autogestion (workers’ self-management) [25]—one of the rights in the “New Contract”—could play an important role for architects in constituting both a spatial practice and a utopian horizon (as generalized self-management) [26]. Lefebvre defines autogestion as “a highly diversified practice that concerns businesses as well as territorial units, cities, and regions…that also includes all aspects of social life” [27]. It is an operative mode that opposes institutionalization by the state; it is not a practice which can be established juridically or function without clashes and contradictions—instead, it reveals the contradictions inherent in the state precisely because it is the trigger of those emergent contradictions [28]. Like democracy, autogestion must be continually enacted; it is never a “condition,” but a struggle:

The concept of autogestion does not provide a model, does not trace a line. It points to a way, and thus to a strategy. This strategy must exclude maneuvers and manipulations that render practice illusory; this strategy must therefore prevent the monopolization of the word and the concept by institutions that transform them into fiction. In addition, the strategy must concretize autogestion and extend it to all levels and sectors. This perpetual struggle for autogestion is the class struggle [29].

On the one hand, architects can design spaces and systems that facilitate self-management, and, on the other, architects can build their own practices as self-managed organizations—all toward the ultimate generalization of self-management. In light of increasing unemployment for growing swathes of the population, together with prospects for widespread automation, self-managed organizations centered on localized care—like perhaps Bratton’s speculations on “ecojurisdictions” organized around solidarities of energy production and its consequences—could become an essential part of the city-to-come [30]. Furthermore, as architecture and Lefebvre scholar Łukasz Stanek has suggested, architects should “[extend] the struggles for the ‘right to the city’ toward equal access not only to land, public transport, and infrastructure but also to spaces of education and enjoyment,” toward a use-economy of social space organized around aspirations everyone can share [31].

Lefebvre once paraphrased Vladimir Lenin’s slogan, “Socialism is electrification plus Soviet power,” with the formulation, “Socialism is autogestion plus a modern information system”—an uncanny assertion from today’s point of view [32]. Still, according to Lefebvre, autogestion never presents itself with the clarity of a purely rational, technical operation, and it cannot be enforced, only stimulated under optimal circumstances [33/34]. What would be the implications of attempting to stimulate autogestion with the computational tools at hand, and what party or platform would do it? Would autogestion be able to address all the mounting challenges that face urban society and pose an existential threat to urban life? Will architects and planners of “smart” cities prefer to wipe settlements like Karail off the map rather than confronting head-on the contradictions they exhibit? Bratton cautions against designing for emergencies and encourages instead to plan with them, because “accommodating emergency is also how a perhaps illegitimate state of exception is stabilized and over time normalized” [35]. Accordingly, the user’s right to the city recognizes today’s and tomorrow’s emergencies not as exceptions to the rule, but as the rule itself: the emergency is already here, and it has been here far too long.

To find out more about the project, get your hands on a copy of Ed #2 The Architecture of Disaster here!

[1] This essay is based on “The User’s Right to the City: Planetary-scale Computation and the Right to the City” (Master's thesis, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee, November 2017), http://raumstrategien.com/benjamin-busch-masters-thesis.
[2] Henri Lefebvre, “The Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 [1967]): 147–159, 158.
[3] “Le droit à la ville,” L’homme et la société, no. 6 (October–December 1967): 29–35 appeared in the lead-up to the May 1968 events. The article was later published as a chapter in the volume Le droit à la ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968), whose first English translation was published in Lefebvre, Writings on Cities (1996).
[4] Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 179–191.
[5] Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [1970]) 1.
[6] City-dwellers account for 54 per cent of the total global population, and this percentage is expected to increase. Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2014 Revision (New York: United Nations, 2015), accessed January 28, 2018 https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Report.pdf.
[7] Eighty per cent of those without electricity live in rural areas. International Energy Agency, “Energy poverty,” accessed January 27, 2018 https://www.iea.org/topics/energypoverty.
[8] Elisa T. Bertuzzo, "During the Urban Revolution – Conjunctures on the Streets of Dhaka," in Urban Revolution Now: Henri Lefebvre in Social Research and Architecture, ed. Łukasz Stanek, Christian Schmid, and Ákos Moravánszky (Farham: Ashgate, 2014): 49–69, 51.
[9] Elisa T. Bertuzzo, “Creolized Technologies of Demoralization,” Technosphere Magazine (June 2017): https://technosphere-magazine.hkw.de/p/df946f20-0a5e-11e7-a854-a190ad88b4c8.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Joe Shaw and Mark Graham, “An Informational Right to the City?,” in Antipode (February 2017); Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City, e-book (Oxford: Meatspace Press, February 2017). See also Verso Books, eds., The Right to the City: A Verso Report, e-book (London: Verso, November 2017).
[12] Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016). Refer to section 61, “Death of the User,” 271–74.
[13] Ibid., 375.
[14] Henri Lefebvre, “From the Social Pact to the Contract of Citizenship,” in Key Writings, ed. Stuart Elden, Elizabeth Lebas, and Eleonore Kofman (London: Continuum, 2003) 238–54.
[15] Ibid., 253.
[16] Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, 181.
[17] Henri Lefebvre and the Groupe de Navarrenx, Du contrat de citoyenneté (Paris: Syllepse etc., 1990): 36.
[18] Bratton, op. cit., 44.
[19] Ibid., 66–7.
[20] Ibid., 152.
[21] Bratton, op. cit., 174.
[22] Ibid., 404n42.
[23] Łukasz Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011) 204–233.
[24] Nathaniel Coleman, Lefebvre for Architects (Oxon: Routledge, 2015) 51.
[25] The term “autogestion” can be traced back to the Serbo-Croatian term samoupravljanje (self-management). Under Tito’s leadership, the socialist economy of Yugoslavia was organized around workers’ self-management in contradistinction to the Eastern Bloc countries, which all practiced central planning and centralized management.
[26] For a discussion of the right to the city and its relationship with autogestion, refer to Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” in Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2014): 141–54.
[27] Henri Lefebvre, “Comments on a New State Form,” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, ed. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 [1979]): 124–37, 135.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Bratton, op. cit., 98–9.
[31] Henri Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, ed. Łukasz Stanek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), lxi.
[32] Predrag Vranicki quoted in Klaus Ronneberger, “Henri Lefebvre and the Question of Autogestion,” in Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade, ed. Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009) 89–116.
[33] Lefebvre, State, Space, World, 134.
[34] Ibid., 136.
[35] Bratton, op. cit.103.