Although Henri Lefebvre’s “The Right to the City” was published in Paris in 1968, it was actually written in 1967 to mark the centenary of the publication of Karl Marx's Das Kapital (1867). In the years since its publication, the theme of “The Right to the City” has been widely adopted along with Lefebvre’s insistence on the centrality of urban struggle in our time and his focus on the need for a theoretical grounding that has led to the blossoming of a new and fertile area of marxist urban studies. In recent years we have witnessed a major revival of the concept in such initiatives as the World Charter for the Human Right to the City (January 2003) that was collectively authored by groups that first came together in February 2002 at a "World Seminar for the Human Right to the City" sponsored by the World Social Forum. An important development here in the United States is the Right to the City Alliance that was formed in 2007 and includes dozens of grassroots organizations across the country dedicated to strengthening urban struggles and fostering regional and national collaborations.

Lefebvre’s approach challenges the primacy of market forces -- and the taken-for-granted capitalists' quest for profit -- in determining how and where people live and how government should work and what it should do. The “Right to the City” is not just about the right just to be in the city, but about fighting for the right to govern and control urban space and the right to live in a society where the needs of our most vulnerable urban residents -- not developers -- are put at the center of public policy. So, the right to the city includes not only the right to housing and food; but also the right to excellent public education; the right to public space and culture; the right to environmental justice; the right to living-wage jobs and health care; the right to citizenship for all; the right to live without state surveillance and police repression, which historically has targeted people of color, immigrants and women, queer and transgendered people, among others.