The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Right to Public Space

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Right to Public Space, by Don Mitchell. New York, London: The Guilford Press, 2003. Paper, $23.00, Pp. 270.

The Right to the City is both a scholarly and a passionate work. It explores upper-class assault on the working-class right to public places in cities, especially for the homeless who, denied that right, are denied a place to live. "The question that drives this book," Mitchell writes, "is how is that right determined; how is it policed, legitimized, or undercut?"

Public places originate when cities map squares, monumental plazas, or pedestrian shopping malls. They are places where working-class people claim the right to gather, speak, demonstrate, and organize, always harassed by upper classes calling for "order" to be enforced by the courts and police. Mitchell examines the people's struggle for the right to public space over the past 100 years and a "set of questions about the dialectic of order and disorder as it is worked out in specific places at critical times," documented by 23 pages of references and in extensive notes.

In one succinct paragraph, Mitchell states the gist...