A right to the City in the Global South.
A right to the city should be no rejection of urban society; there should be no exclusion for anyone to not have access to the qualities and benefits of life. “A right” is individual liberty to access urban resources, change ourselves. This is a right of commonality for everyone to come together by participation by changing our city space and economic development. by changing our city.
Social inequality has developed at a global scale with impacts on social division in our society. The perspective of the right to a city should be a priority of the lives of the poor and transformation of cities and neighborhoods, which is including but is not limited to housing, employment, and upward mobility rather than segregation and urbanism. While the Global North has become dominant, developed, and industrialized.
According to the reading, A right to the City, paragraph “Urban living conditions and producing the right to the city in the Global South.” The urban condition in the Global South features a number of important specificities, which affect the production of the right to the city. Indeed, such production reactivates questions of national, racial and ethnic identity in continents where the question of legitimacy is formulated against a backdrop of decolonization and a reformulation of divisions constructed during colonization.” Global South does go beyond the Americas. It is including low-income countries such as South Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Brazil, etc. This confronted the difficulty between ordinary everyday experience and urban policies and political mobilization of city dwellers’ experience of social exclusion.
When you think of The Right to the City you think of social justice, human rights, communities, equality, and urban life. “Harvey believes, “The right to the city is a very interesting logical structure of Anti-capitalist struggle, whose right meaning has yet to be defined.”
According to Harvey, “The right to the City, page 23, The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing our city. It is moreover, a common rather than an individual right since the transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. Harvey believes there is a relationship between Urbanization and Capitalism.”
Capitalism needs urbanization but it is not the solution to urbanism. The two are similar to each other but are not the same they are different. Capital and labor offer access to work and are expressed in struggles over the work process and wage. The accumulation uses as a value of the basis of profit in the community as capital and capital represented itself by development and creates new places that generate an income for future profit. The urban process under capitalism controlled the effect of power over the community as a class struggle of the labor force on the basis of profit; while the needs of the lower-class population are being displaced and the middle and upper class is being benefited.
In conclusion, the right to the city in the Global South and the right to the City, both deal with inequality and shows the need for a more equal society rather than excluding residents. The resident’s quality of life and well-being are essential for everyday lives in society and with the need for investment in the community and advance for growth of services and products.
Sources:
Morianne Morange and Amandine Spire (2015), A Right to the City in the Global South.
David Harvey (2008), The Right to the City.
