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WiSe 23/24: Cities, rights and memories

Glenda Vicenzi Mariana Caldas

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To conceive of rights from the perspective of the city offers an important possibility to materialize the normative and abstract debates on law. It means to acknowledge how social and political life and its regulation by law are organized by, but also constitute, the domain of space. Cities can be considered as highly-condensed and comparatively small-scale entities in which the complex dynamics between law and political dynamics play out faster and more intensely than in the broader context of the (nation) state. As Henri Lefebvre points out, cities are at the interface between the “near order” (i.e. private/particular relationships) and the “far order” (i.e. society as a whole). Besides that, one of the basic dichotomies traditionally mobilized by legal theory, i.e. the public and private one, becomes especially visible and complexified when grasped through a focus on the cities. They can, therefore, be seen as heuristic devices or, indeed, laboratories in which spatial-political-normative processes can be observed and assessed. In this course, we aim to provide a theoretical basis on the state of the art and current debates regarding the right to the city and spatial justice, addressing key concepts such as space/territory, frontiers (symbolic/material), landscape, etc. Beyond that, we will approach how the claim for a right to the city represents an important grammar for social movements and political struggles in the urban context. The aim is to observe how these claims address a variety of precarities that advances for basic rights, such as housing, transport, sanitation, and health. More specifically we would like to dedicate a part of the course to emphasize and bring light to the social and political struggle for memory in urban contexts, which both broadens more limited perspectives on social rights and is able to intervene in the complex dynamics between politics, law, and space. The course is organized into four parts: i) the theoretical state of the art of key concepts of the right to the city; ii) the political claim for a right to the city; iii) the theoretical debate regarding the right to memory, focusing on urban contexts; iv) case study: the Brazilian case of the Museu da Maré, a communitarian museum located at the Complexo de favelas da Maré, in Rio de Janeiro. close