Abstract

[Henri Lefebvre and the right to the city: genesis and structure of a “prospective” right] The con-cept of the “right to the city” stems from a long intellectual journey of the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, which we will attempt to reconstruct here in a broad outline. For Lefebvre, the right to the city is an essential component of the contemporary urban condition, located at a point outside the tradition of both “natural right” and “contrac-tual right” theories. It is a right that belongs to the citizens, to the groups that make up the city, that is the direct fruit of the collective production of the urban, and represents the formal crystallisation of what the action of those who live in the city has built up over time.