CONCEPT
The Right to the City
Lefebvre's 1968 claim — still contested, still radical — that the inhabitants of a city have the right not merely to live in it but to produce it, to shape the spatial fabric they inhabit rather than adapt to a fabric woven by experts for someone else's purposes.
Le Droit à la ville, published in 1968, advanced one of the most durably influential arguments of twentieth-century political theory. Its central claim is that the city is not a product to be consumed but a oeuvre — a work — to be collectively produced, and that the right to the city is not merely the right to inhabit but the right to participate in making. The city's inhabitants are, or should be, co-authors of the space they inhabit. The right was not being exercised in 1968, and the Henri Lefebvre — On AI volume argues it is not being exercised now in the digital domain, where the spaces that organize the cognitive lives of billions are produced by a concentrated handful of engineers whose users have no role in design.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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