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Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York and London: Guilford Press 2003)
DON MITCHELL's The Right to the City makes an original contribution to an expanding literature on contested access to urban public space by employing the concept of locational conflict. A human geographer at Syracuse University, Mitchell argues that "space, place, and location are not just the stage upon which rights are contested, but are actively produced by - and in turn serve to structure - struggles over rights... In a class-based society, locational conflict can be understood to be conflict over the legitimacy of various uses of space, and thus of various strategies for asserting rights, by those who have been disenfranchised by the workings of property or other Objective' social processes by which specific activities are assigned a location." (81)
Mitchell's book is influenced by Henri Lefebvre's writings, particularly the 1974 groundbreaking study La production de l'espace, and Le droit à la ville (1968), the inspiration for Mitchell's title. In the first of the six chapters, Mitchell draws from Lefebvre's insistence on the right of all citizens to inhabit the city. He argues that the problem with the bourgeois city is that it is "not so much a site of participation as one of expropriation by a dominant class (and a set of economic interests) that is not really interested in making the city a site for the cohabitation of differences." (18) Because property rights imply the power to exclude, groups without property become alienated from political power. This leads to violence because disempowered groups are denied access to public space. (17-21) Laws are enacted to counteract violence and to protect citizens, but they also limit their rights. Limiting rights is geographical, and especially so for homeless people who are denied the right to housing, as well as access to public space. With the explicit aim of establishing urban order, current neo-liberal practices reduce the democratization of public space.
Locational conflict is a very useful...