Claiming the Right to the City
Claiming the Right to the City
Rethinking Urban Transformations in Brazil
The right to the city – the freedom for all to inhabit urban space, to occupy, govern, change, and enjoy the city, and to access its resources – is fundamental to quality of life and genuinely inclusive democracy. Claiming the Right to the City critically explores attempts to redefine Brazil’s planning model based on social justice.
The Brazilian experience of profound urban challenges over the past forty years has been characterized by a persistent division between a theoretically acknowledged right to the city and the reality of urban policy, planning, and practice, within the context of economic inequality and unequal rights. Abigail Friendly highlights the vital role of urban social movements and participatory planning, as well as the tools used in implementing progressive goals such as controlling urban vacancy and applying land value capture. Looking to the future, Friendly proposes an approach uniting institutions with bottom-up engagement of citizens, communities, and grassroots organizations to drive urban transformations.
Claiming the Right to the City provides insight into how the right to the city is localized in practice, offering lessons that are broadly applicable to cities around the world. As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, insights from Brazil can reveal lessons for the future.
This combination of theoretical discussion and practical insight will be immensely useful to academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines, from urban studies, planning, and urban sociology to geography and Latin American studies.
Abigail Friendly is a leading figure in the study of Brazil, and, more broadly, for the urban affairs field. With Claiming the Right to the City, she continues to chart an important course in scholarly debates with this engaging, sophisticated, and cogent analysis of the right to the city in one of the world’s most dynamic countries, offering lessons from the Global South to advance equality for all people.
Claiming the Right to the City presents a well-crafted review of progressive urban policies in Brazil since the 1980s, their achievements, and shortcomings. The case study of Niteroi is in itself a major contribution to the field.
Abigail Friendly is an urban planner and specialist on urban policy in Brazil. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
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