Regain The Right To The City

David Harvey is the most influential humanistic geographer and Neo-Marxism theorist about spatial theory in the contemporary western world. As a determined Marxist, Harvey has broadened the field of vision of contemporary geography, sociology and politics by Marxist methods in his many monographs and theses. After the World War II, with the accelerated urbanization process, city crisis rose one after another. Different subjects on the research of city were rising gradually, which gathered as a strong thoughts. Among them, the right to the city was becoming one of the central topics and continued to today. David Harvey is the main representative of this theory. On the basis of Capital and by using the Marxist stand, viewpoint and method, he criticizes the urbanization under capitalist market economy, especially under the ideology of new latitudinarian economy prevailling in western countries. His aims are to interpret his own understanding on the right to the city in capitalism and its absence, to try his best to seek the ways of regaining the this right and to explore that how the city can recombine so as to Benefit the social justice and the economy and become the core fortress to oppose the reactionary forces of capitalism. In the first part of this dissertation, I discourse the background of the research on the right to the city, as well as many different opinions about this topic at home an abroad. In the second part, I expound the origin of the right to the city, pointing that the theory of spacial justice is its ideological foundation and Henri Lefebvre’s theory about the right to the city has had a profound influence on Harvey’s. In the third part, I expound the Lefebvre’s expectation of this right and its definition in Harvey’s opinion. And then, I discuss the absence of this right from three main parts:the urban toots of capitalist crises, the privatization of urban commons and grabbing the monopoly rent by cultural commoditization. In the fourth part, I explain the Harvey’s opinion on regaining this right by urban social movement to build many anti-capitalism cities. Finally, I give the conclusion and evaluation to the David Harvey’s theory of the right to the city.