Towards the city as the oeuvre: A theoretical explanation of the right to the city of Lefebvre in development and urban planning

Ebrahimi, Mohammad; Alavi, Seyed Ali; Meshkini, Abolfazl; Sadri, Hosein

doi:10.22034/jsi.2024.560583.1614

Towards the city as the oeuvre: A theoretical explanation of the right to the city of Lefebvre in development and urban planning

Authors

Mohammad Ebrahimi ¹

Seyed Ali Alavi ²

Abolfazl Meshkini ²

Hosein Sadri ³

¹ PhD in Geography and Urban Planning, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran.

² Associate Professor, Department of Geography and Urban Planning Faculty of Humanities, University of Tarbiat Modares, Tehran, Iran

³ Professor, Department of Architecture and Urban Design, Girne American University, Cyprus

10.22034/jsi.2024.560583.1614

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.

Keywords

oeuvre

The Right to the City

Henri Lefebvre

Urban Planning

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