Just a few weeks before the 1st World Summit of Local Governments for the Right to the City, which will be taking place in Saint-Denis and Aubervilliers (France) from 10 to 12 December 2012, the right to the city is at the heart of discussion in France.
“Which route to take for the unequal metropolis”, the example of Paris, “gives way to a supportive, inclusive metropolis?”. Following the inauguration in Saint-Denis (93), Luc Besson’s City of cinema, Patrick Braouezec, the former mayor of Saint-Denis and now president of Metropolitan Paris, wishes to “do away with territories of the first, second and even third division”.
Patrick Braouezec invites the demand for the “right to the city” (1), extended to the “right to the metropolis for one and all”, taken as a collective right, to be placed at the centre of the discussion on urban policy. From the International Coalition of Inhabitants to the Forum of Local Authorities for Social Inclusion passing through that of Peripheral Local Authorities for Solidarity-based Metropolis (FAL-P), among others, the “right to the city”, made popular by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, becomes an alternative to the current urban dynamics of globalization which divide, fragment and exclude. Its vindication in the diversity of local situations –“another world is possible and it begins in the city”– opposes the “worst of all possible worlds”.
Therefore, developing the metropolis from the diversity of centrality to make it up –including Paris–, means resolutely accepting the first ambition of building “the proximity” of all functions of the city for each of its citizens. If obviously the “right to mobility” is important, urban development cannot only be a history of financial flows, of goods, of workforce and consumers to be transported, of square metres of “titrated” office space to be quoted on the stock market and of habitats, it must be conviviality, access to rights and needs, public spaces, “living together” …
See the whole of the article on the following page: http://blogs.mediapart.fr/edition/les-invites-de-mediapart/article/220912/en-ville-le-droit-la-centralite-pour-tous
(1) The right to the city : a few keys to understand the proposal of creating “another possible world” Charlotte Mathivet in Villes pour toutes et tous, pour le droit à la ville, propositions et Expérience, Edition Habitat International Coalition, Santiago, Chile, 2011.