Claiming the Right to the City: Rethinking Urban Transformations in Brazil - Hardcover

Friendly, Abigail

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774871903 ISBN 13: 9780774871907

Publisher: University of British Columbia Press, 2025

Synopsis

The right to the city – the freedom for all to occupy, govern, change, and enjoy the city and access its resources – is fundamental to genuinely inclusive democracy. Claiming the Right to the City critically explores attempts to redefine Brazil's planning model based on social justice.

The Brazilian experience of profound urban challenges over the past forty years reveals the division between a theoretically acknowledged right to the city and the reality of urban policy, planning, and practice, within the context of economic inequality and unequal rights. Abigail Friendly highlights the role of urban social movements and participatory planning, and proposes an approach uniting institutions with bottom-up engagement of citizens, communities, and grassroots organizations to drive urban transformations.

Claiming the Right to the City provides insight into how the right to the city is localized in practice, offering lessons that are broadly applicable to cities around the world.

About this title

About the Author

Abigail Friendly is an urban planner and specialist on urban policy in Brazil. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of British Columbia Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0774871903
• ISBN 13: 9780774871907
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 328