The Right to the City
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 AI Story
The book arrived in May 1968, weeks before the student uprising in Paris that Lefebvre's teaching had helped to catalyze. Its argument was formed in dialogue with urban struggles across the postwar period — the displacement of working-class populations to the grands ensembles, the remaking of city centers for capital and tourism, the technocratic logic that treated urban space as a technical problem to be solved by experts rather than a political question to be decided collectively.
The concept migrated in the decades after Lefebvre's death. It became a rallying cry for urban movements worldwide — in São Paulo, Istanbul, Cape Town, in every city where capital and state controlled spatial production to the exclusion of the people who lived there. The United Nations adopted the language in its New Urban Agenda. David Harvey extended the concept into a comprehensive critique of neoliberal urbanization.
The AI application is developed most fully in Mushkani et al., 'The Right to AI' (arXiv, 2025), which proposes that the Lefebvrian framework be applied directly to AI governance. The paper reconceptualizes AI not as a product to be consumed but as societal infrastructure — the digital equivalent of the city — and argues that the right to infrastructure is not merely the right to use it but the right to shape it. This volume extends the argument further, distinguishing governance (which operates at the level of conceived space) from production (which requires the participation of inhabitants in design decisions).
The distinction between governance and production is Lefebvrian. Governance constrains designers; production involves inhabitants in designing. The EU AI Act, Anthropic's responsible scaling policies, and the various AI ethics frameworks currently proposed are governance interventions. They shape what designers may build. They do not give inhabitants any role in building. The right to the screen, in its full Lefebvrian sense, would require something more — the standing of lived experience in design, not merely in regulation.
Origin
Lefebvre wrote the book during his professorship at Nanterre in 1967, the year before the uprising that named his students enragés. The book drew on fifteen years of urban analysis, including his extended study of Mourenx — a postwar French new town that became his empirical case for the failures of technocratic urbanism.
Key Ideas
The city is a work, not a product. Its value lies in being made collectively, not in being consumed by occupants.
The right is to production, not occupation. The right to the city is the right to participate in making it, not merely the right to live within it as designed.
Governance is not production. Regulation of designers differs from participation in design. The right to the city demands the second, not merely the first.
The concept extends. The AI interface, as the most consequential space of the twenty-first century, requires the same analytical treatment: the right to the screen.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (Anthropos, 1968).
- David Harvey, 'The Right to the City,' New Left Review 53 (2008).
- Mushkani, Chayes, Allen et al., 'The Right to AI,' arXiv:2501.17907 (2025).