The right to the city in Latin America: agendas in tension

Abstract

The matter of the Right to the city, originally define by Henry Lefebvre in 1968, has been (re) visited by many social scientists. Today, it reemerges with emphasis, not only from the academic and the social movements fields, but also from the field of policy making, that make their own reinterpretations of its postulates, creating a tension around the axles that gave shape to the original notion. Thus, a new concept emerges, one that is ambiguous and indistinctly used both by progressive and conservative anti-democratic agendas. 

We set ourselves to recover some of these debates regarding the right to the city within the latinamerican context, and put in question the controversies that emerge between its underlying principles and the general guidelines of the multilateral international organizations’ agendas that encourage its effective making in the region, more accurately, the case of UN-Habitat.

Our starting point is the original concept; we present some of its revisions and then move on to the regional debates. Then, we present the main topics of the aforesaid organization’s meetings: Habitat I (1976), Habitat II (1996) and Habitat III (2016). We take a special interest in the New Urban Agenda and the recomendations made to the Member