Iranian Journal of Sociology

Abstract Urban development goes beyond understanding the city as a physical and economic product. Lefebvre's theory of the right to the city is a call to understand the city beyond a material product and believes that urban development requires socio-spatial transformations of the city that both belong to and are the result of its inhabitants. This research has a fundamental-developmental purpose and a qualitative content analysis type, which is adopted to expand the theoretical framework of the right to the city. In this research, the theoretical lens of the right to the city has been used as an analytical framework to explain urban development. Urban development from the point of view of  Lefebvre space production consists of three objective, mental and social spaces, which have three fundamental rights with dialectical orientations, including: the right to appropriation (possession in production and consumption), the right to participation (transformative and reproductive participation) and it forms the right to difference (social and spatial). The right to the city includes the three principles of spatial justice, democracy, and urban vitality, which in urban development, they form content, procedural and diagnostic dimension. Urban development based on the right to the city is an objectively, subjectively and sensibly integrated thing that simultaneously refers to the condemnation of exchange value and prioritizing the value of using urban space. This theoretical framework enables us to dialectically identify the constituents of each city realm and work towards "cities for people, not for profit" and this is a start. A point to change ourselves by changing the city.
 

Abstract With the generalization of neoliberalization in recent decades, some changes have been made in the Third World’s cities to remove barriers to capital accumulation and capital flows. An obvious example is a change in the use of urban space. In this research, we try to present a theoretical model explaining the influential factors of the change of urban land use using the approach of the political economy of space. For this purpose, with regard to urban and global factors affecting the land use change, we presented a theoretical model of the political economy. Then, in order to design a theoretical model about influential factors on urban land use change, we combined the urban and global factors. The findings demonstrated that to propose a comprehensive explanatory model, we need to consider the internal factors for the Third World countries.