Urban Studies 400: The Right to the City

CopyLeft 2011 Elvin K. Wyly

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Occupy Vancouver, October 2011 (Elvin Wyly)

Urban Studies 400:

Seminar in Urban Studies, January-May 2012 Edition

Before the First Class...

Before your first day in any seminar, and especially any seminar with me, I recommend you take a look at this:

Michael Kahn (1971). "The Seminar." Unpublished manuscript. Santa Cruz: Kresge College, University of California - Santa Cruz.

Thanks to Jayme Walenta and F. Bonnie Kaserman for recommending this piece, which is also used in a course at the University of Kentucky. We certainly won't use Kahn's recommendations as absolute, rigid straightjackets, but many of the suggestions and insights are very much worth consideration.

CopyLeft 2011 Elvin K. Wyly

Except where otherwise noted, this site is

licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.

The Right to the City

"In the 1960s, when the majority of people on Earth were still rural dwellers, the 'right to the city' was theorized as a radical 'cry and demand' by the French urbanist and philosopher, Henri Lefebvre. Fifty years on, now that Lefebvre's urban revolution has largely consummated itself, how does the 'right to the city' fare?"

Andy Merrifield (2011). "Crowd Politics." New Left Review 71, September/October, 103-114, quote from p. 105.

this course is an interdisciplinary exploration of social justice and urbanism.

Cities are inherently and inescapably collective human creations: you can't have a city by yourself. City life, therefore, is defined by encounters with difference, negotiations of conflict, and political struggles over who gets what, when, and where. Cities intensify the human experience. Cities force societies to make difficult choices in defining and honoring principles of social justice. For the past half-century, however, these tough choices have been delayed and denied. The inescapably social, collective essence of urbanization has been hidden by theories and politics that reduce every process to the individual -- the heroic, risk-taking entrepreneur, or the rational, utility-maximizing consumer. Planetary urbanism is now finally shattering the myths of an increasingly aggressive, violent form of global capitalism that makes Hobbes seem like a utopian optimist. Now, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world's people are living in cities. More people are living in cities today than lived in the entire world when Lefebvre first wrote about the "right to the city" a few months before protests broke out on the streets of cities across the world in the spring of 1968. Now, every day, reading the headlines makes one wonder: is this a return to the revolutionary times of 1968? If those in positions of power and privilege resist reasonable calls for reform and social justice, will the echoes of 1968 become the violent screams of 1848?

Occupy Vancouver, October 2011 (Elvin Wyly)

Occupy DC, October 2011 (Elvin Wyly)

Vancouver Olympic Village Housing Protest, May 2010 (Elvin Wyly)

Mobilization Against Occupation:

Worldwide Protests Against the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Cleveland, Ohio, March 2003 (Elvin Wyly)

Don't Attack Iraq:

Protests Against the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Glasgow, Scotland, September 2002 (Elvin Wyly)

Vancouver March for Housing Rights, April 2009 (Elvin Wyly)

The "Poverty Olympics," preparing for the Vancouver-Whistler 2010 Winter Olympic Games, February 2009 (Elvin Wyly)

Chicago, March 2006 (Elvin Wyly)

Vancouver March for Housing Rights, April 2009 (Elvin Wyly)

If you're looking for archival materials on "The City as an Entertainment Machine," see this.