The right to the city manifesto

by Antoni Vives

Consider this very short writing a manifesto: we have the right to enjoy the city. We want the city, we like the city, with its downtown, and its suburbs, with its offices and its condominiums, with its streets, squares, crescents and circus. We love and we want it: open, cosmopolitan, identity-loaded, just, human, close to all of us.

Yes, we have the right to the city, a city in which each one of us is a person, a real human being able to develop all our natural capacities and skills, a place where we experience the best and the worst of our beings, a place where no one cares, but where everybody is important; the city as a humanizing experience of neighbourhood.

The city is the place where we have to invent a new humanity on the ashes of former humanities; where we put a man or a woman beside another man or another woman and generate justice, knowledge, love and happiness, life and experience. The city is the gift of human history, the gift that has to be reloaded with humanity as we understand it today, at the beginning of the new century.

We have the right to reconsider the wrongs we have done to our cities during the late 20th century, when ideological cynicism sold modernity as a pile of scraps, when rationalism lost its common sense and became dull and empty, generating empty spaces that enhanced empty lives. Our old cities have been stuck in the same spot for centuries, but we must have the courage to generate new connections, make new selections, seek new objectives and take new perspectives.

The city is a human right, and it has to be protected as such. We have to ask for a new city based on new shapes, new functions, new interactions: how can we be building without considering the sun, the wind, the water, the land? Is there anyone out there sketching streets and buildings based upon these four elements? Yes, they’ve always been there, but we forgot them. We forgot the creeks that crossed our fields, we forgot the hills that shaped our landscape, we forgot the wind that shaped our ideas, and we got what we deserve. It’s time to recover the taste for what lasts, for what brings the future back.

The city is a vast network of human links, unbelievably complex. For this reason we abhor the old city planners that know only one way of building new cities: tearing down what already exists. A kid would do that! But when they tear down a favela, a suburb or an old, dense downtown with the excuse of cleaning it up, they destroy the most valuable effect of what a city is: human interaction, common resources, history and stories, family, hates and loves. The challenge is forgetting city urbanism and leaping into city reconstruction.

We have the right to the city, to the dense, difficult, complex, marvelous invention with which man has decided to live and grow as a human being capable of generating coherent and cohesive presents and better futures.