Question

Define and explain Lefebvre and what is a right for whom

Answer 1

• Lefebvre presents a radical vision for a city in which users manage urban space for themselves, beyond the control of both the state and capitalism.He says that modern citizenship takes the form of a contract between the state and the citizenry that specifies, among other things, the rights of citizens.
• What we require, he argues, is to radically extend and deepen the contract, to articulate a new and augmented set of rights, and to struggle to achieve them. He lists many different rights, among them rights to information, to difference, to self-management, and a right to the city.
• For Lefebvre formal, legal rights are never God-given, nor are they natural rights that the framers of constitutions simply write down. Rather rights are always the outcome of political struggle. They are the manifestation, the end result of collective claims made by mobilized citizens.
• Because they result from struggle, they are always subject to further struggle, to renewed political agitation. This way of viewing rights means that for Lefebvre the point of proposing the new rights in the contract is prefigurative: they are political claims to possible rights that will require mobilization and struggle. His goal in articulating these new rights is precisely to initiate this struggle.
• Lefebvre insisted on the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, through which the overwhelming majority of society comes to control the decisions that determine that society.
• Lefebvre and others generalize the idea of autogestion to imagine self-management in all areas of life. The most important of these areas for Lefebvre is the state.
• Autogestion in that context means people managing collective decisions themselves rather than surrendering those decisions to a cadre of state officials.
• Such autogestion insists on grassroots decision making and the decentralization of control to autonomous local units. And because it refuses to turn over responsibility to a managerial class, autogestion requires a great awakening on the part of regular people.
• As autogestion develops, as it becomes generalized throughout society, people increasingly realize their own power. They come to see themselves as perfectly capable of managing their affairs on their own.
• As a result, institutions of control, like the corporation and the state, begin to make less and less sense. They begin to wither away,And so the right to autogestion or self-management is prominent among the rights in Lefebvre’s new contract of citizenship.
• In addition to the right to autogestion, Lefebvre’s new contract also includes a right to the city.What the right to the city adds for Lefebvre is a deeply spatial understanding of politics, and in particular an understanding of politics that places urban space at the very center of its vision.
• The right to the city is one vital element of this movement toward the urban. That movement is set in motion when inhabitants decide to rise up and reclaim space in the city, when they assert use value over exchange value, encounter over consumption, interaction over segregation, free activity and play over work.
• As they appropriate space, as they develop the ability to manage the city for themselves, they give shape to the urban. They get better at perceiving its form, at feeling its rhythms and moods.
• They help bring the urban out of the shadows and into the center, into the heart of the city and its social life. In innumerable tiny increments they can overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of the urban, and they can transform the impossible into the possible.
• For Lefebvre the urban constitutes a revolution, but one that requires millions of everyday acts of resistance and creation.
• Lefebvre saw his new contract of citizenship not as an end goal, but as a political awakening, a catalyst for a movement toward autogestion. The right to the city is similarly a beginning, an opening, a starting out down the path toward a possible urban world. That possible world is a long way off, and it is also, at the same time, right in front of us.