CONCEPT
The Right to the Screen
The extension of
Lefebvre's right to the city into the digital domain—the demand that the inhabitants of AI-mediated environments have genuine standing in how those environments are designed, not merely the freedom to use what has been built for them.
Lefebvre's 1968 pamphlet
Le Droit à la Ville argued that the inhabitants of a city have a right not merely to occupy its spaces but to participate in producing them—that the space belongs not to the planners who design it nor the capital that funds it but to the people whose daily lives constitute it. The claim was political, not merely architectural: it said that the spatial logic of a society is too consequential to be left to experts and investors, that the person who walks the street every day has knowledge about that street that no planner's blueprint can capture, and that legitimate spatial production requires the genuine participation of those who inhabit the space. The right to the
abstract space of the AI interface is the same claim transposed. The builder who cannot stop working, the developer whose lunch break has been colonized by prompts, the person who feels met