Right to the City

Kirsten Larson asks how architects and planners can help fight poverty without fighting the poor in her recent FAVELissues post entitled, The Right to the City.

Two quotes from her article below.  Read her entire article on FAVELisssues.com

“The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather then an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” – David Harvey, The Right to the City (2008), a postface to Social Justice and the City

The architect’s job becomes a tightrope walk between resisting the impulse to fetishize a harsh urban condition while still looking for value in the alternative spatial articulations that define the social and physical fabric of favelas.