The ‘Right to the City’: Institutional Imperatives of a Developmental State

Abstract

Abstracti jur_954 146..162Under conditions of globalization large cities present unique challenges for poverty reduction and the realization of rights. The urbanization of poverty also underscores the imperative of downscaling the emerging debate about the developmental state to the city scale. The arguments in this article start from the proposition that a universal rights agenda can and should be fulfilled as an alternative to neoliberal aspirations, and that to achieve this development action will be needed on a series of different scales. The article is structured in three main parts. The first section explores the implications for the state of adopting a rights-based agenda in the urban context, giving particular emphasis to defining those rights whose meaning arises from settlement planning or management-based policies and interventions on the individual, household, neighbourhood and more macro-environmental scale (what we call 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation rights or the 'right to the city'). The second part of the article is dedicated to illustrating the particular nature of how rights to the city are blocked or achieved, using the experiences of the Greater Cape Town area. The final section of the article makes a more general case for a more radical rights-based agenda for cities.

Travel choice reframed: “deep distribution” and gender in urban transport

“…Parnell and Pieterse (2010); also Zérah, Tawa Lama-Rewal, Dupont and Chaudhuri (2011). angry collective responses to either the way transport systems are designed or managed − for example, mobilization around higher fares − or to proposals or forced evictions in order to build new or extend old infrastructure. Perhaps more accurately defined as appropriation in the name of recognition and participation, the latter is an increasingly common event in the context of contemporary urban restructuring in which the upgrading of transport infrastructure is a central strategy.…”

Fragment urbanism: Politics at the margins of the city

“…Cape Town too is a deeply fragmented city, particularly through historical inequalities at the intersection of race, class, land and labour (eg Turok, 2001;Lemanski, 2007;Parnell and Pieterse, 2010;McDonald, 2006). While there is evidence of racial mobility in the labour market in South Africa, there is also evidence of growing unemployment amongst poor Black groups (Crankshaw, 2012), and 61% of all Black citizens live below the poverty line (Lawson, 2012: 12).…”

Malaise in the Western Middle Classes

“…In their analysis of the urban injustices of the contemporary South African city, Parnell and Pieterse (2010) take up 'the issue of the universal right to the city as the moral platform from which the developmental role of the state should be defined' (Parnell and Pieterse, 2010, p. 147). They take the example of Cape Town, a large and well-resourced city which nevertheless has a considerable, spatially concentrated group of residents in poverty.…”