This article discusses the growing "right to the city" social movement demanding more inclusive and democratic cities. It describes protests in Barcelona by the PAH group against evictions and a takeover of a bank branch. The movement is joined by others around the world demanding fairer access to housing and public spaces. As urban issues are discussed at UN Habitat conferences, on-the-ground protests continue. While some cities are increasing citizen participation in planning, occupations may continue until cities are more democratically managed and inclusive for all.

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Right to the city: can this growing social
movement win over city officials?
From the Taksim Square and Nuit Debout protests to bank takeovers in Barcelona and women’s
workshops in Delhi, the pressure for more inclusive cities is mounting. As the UN gears up for
Habitat III, will governments listen?
Francesca Perry in Barcelona
Tuesday 19 April 2016 10.46 BST
On a grey and drizzly April morning just steps away from the University of Barcelona,
dozens of men and women, holding protest banners and wearing slogan-emblazoned T-
shirts, stormed into a branch of CatalunyaCaixa bank, chanting “We will never be
defeated!”
Within a matter of minutes, the floor was scattered with paper, the walls plastered in
posters and stickers. The room was charged with the anger and joy of protest. Bank
employees sat sheepishly in a corner, as the protesters continued to sing and shout;
police stood across the street, watching.
The protesters were part of La PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, or
“Mortgage Victims Platform”), a grassroots movement made famous when its former
spokeswoman, Ada Colau, was elected Barcelona mayor. PAH campaigns against the
tenant evictions and mortgage repossessions that have swept Spain following the
financial crisis.
The group has claimed to have stopped thousands of evictions, and their “action” on 5
April was part of their latest campaign, against the investment banking firm Blackstone
Group, which according to PAH bought 90,000 mortgage assets from CatalunyaCaixa and
began trying to evict people. “We occupy banks very often, maybe once a week,” said
PAH member Santi Mas de Xaxàs. “In Barcelona, private interests and speculators – both
national and international – are pushing people out. The banks are being protected while
people’s rights are being violated. We fight against all this, and for the right to decent
housing.”
These evictions – largely done in the name of private sector-led “regeneration” – are
merely one part of a wider whole, in which cities are becoming ever more exclusive. The
group’s protest at the bank deliberately coincided with the latest United Nations’ Habitat
III “thematic meeting” held at the University of Barcelona, which discussed the future of
public space and housing. It’s all building to October’s main, high-profile summit in
Quito, the first Habitat summit in 20 years. Much has changed since the last iteration,
Habitat II, in 1996, and this year’s event – tasked with putting forward a “new urban

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agenda” – seeks to align urban policies worldwide with the major challenges facing cities
and their inhabitants.
It comes at a critical time. Spanish grassroots groups such as PAH and the “corrala”
movement of people living in abandoned buildings are being joined by countless more
around the world, such as the Focus E15 mothers fighting their evictions by occupying
the Carpenter’s Estate in Stratford, east London, all demanding more or less the same
thing: a fairer, more democratic city in the face of rampant property speculation and
privatised public space.
The call to arms at the Habitat III meeting reflected this desire for inclusivity: all people
should have equal access to public services, to housing, to public space; all should be
able to participate in shaping places that include everyone. “Speculation is turning
public spaces into contested spaces and generating inequalities,” Barcelona mayor Ada
Colau told the Habitat III meeting. “Gaps between citizens are being widened. Public
spaces should be for the public good.”
As the conversation continues at the level of UN-Habitat meetings, so the actions
continue on the ground in cities across the world. What the protesters want is their
“right to the city”, as notably championed by British geographer David Harvey, who
called it “the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanisation”. Now,
as Harvey explains, that “right” is mostly restricted to a small political and economic
elite who shape cities after their own desires.
Some city governments are waking up to the idea, though. São Paulo has a Right to the
City Coordination, established as part of their relatively new Municipal Secretariat for
Human Rights and Citizenship (SMDHC), which aims to create public policies for a more
inclusive, participative city. This is perhaps unsurprising in Brazil, a country in which the
City Statute law, passed in 2001, enshrines the right to the city in the form of a new legal-
urban order to provide land access and equity in Brazil’s large metropolitan centres. The
law seeks to prioritise the social, rather than commercial, function of urban land.
“We know that society is demanding new forms of participation,” says Esther Madeline
LeBlanc, the deputy coordinator of the initiative in São Paulo. “The right to the city is
important in assuring human rights, and must be realised with more social participation,
ensuring a democratic administration of the city. We want a city in which public space is
central in social interaction among all citizens: a city made for people.”
It is in public space – the street, the square, the park – that this right to the city is most
often voiced and demanded. The protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, the occupation of
Zuccotti Park in New York, the umbrella revolution in the streets of Hong Kong and now
the Nuit Debout protests in Paris’ Place de la République: public space is the threatened
sphere in which citizens can demand change. And these movements have in turn given
the issue of public space more visibility.
A key concern is giving all groups a say in shaping the kind of city they want to see. The
Because I am a Girl urban programme, for example, aims to improve safety for
adolescent girls in cities, by involving them in workshops and activities where they can
voice and map how their public spaces and transport networks make them feel unsafe,
and what improvements could be made. At the same time, it builds their capacity for

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Topics
UN Habitat Housing Communities Regeneration Protest Occupy movement
meaningful participation in urban development and governance: girls are encouraged to
review existing city policies and discuss how to amend them. The programme is
currently active in five cities: Delhi, Hanoi, Kampala, Cairo and Lima.
“We need a multitude of perspectives in participation to ensure we are building
inclusive, resilient cities with social cohesion,” says Kathryn Travers, director of Women
in Cities International, who have partnered with Plan International and UN-Habitat on
the programme. Enabling these girls to have a say in shaping better public spaces is
critical in a context where women around the world continue to face harassment and
violence in the urban realm: of the girls that the programme have worked with, 24% of
them said that they never feel safe in public places. “It’s crucial that women and girls are
consulted,” Travers adds. “Gender gaps in cities lead to exclusion in public spaces. In
some cities, upwards of 90% of women experience daily sexual harassment in public
space.”
While the Because I am a Girl urban programme can only make policy recommendations,
other governing bodies are moving towards greater public involvement in urban change.
Pla Estel, a Barcelona-based initiative, is working with the city government on a “youth
participatory process” that works to understand young people’s needs in public space
and feed this back into the city’s plans. In Madrid, the council is undertaking 109
neighbourhood regeneration projects in participation with local residents.
As Raquel del Rio, part of Madrid’s sustainable urban development team, explains when
we meet in Barcelona, the city council has been helping people in investment-starved
places to make improvements to their housing and public space, by providing them with
access to funds and other resources. Larger assembly meetings are also held with all of
Madrid’s neighbourhood districts to establish what improvements people want to see
locally. And there has been massive public involvement in the revitalisation of the Plaza
de España in the city centre: more than 30,000 ideas from citizens have been gathered,
and later this year the public will vote on which scheme they want to be taken forward.
It’s the biggest participation project ever in Madrid.
The goal, in other words, is for trashing bank branches to become a thing of the past.
Again and again, better involvement of citizens in urban development was
recommended at the Habitat III meeting as the key to achieving more inclusive cities.
“We need meaningful, transparent, participatory processes,” said Puvendra Akkiah, a
planner for the city of Durban. “There are no viable public spaces without communities,
and no viable communities without public space: public space is a generator of
democratic cities.” But until those public spaces are more accessible, housing more
inclusive and cities more democratically managed, these occupations and protests are
likely to continue unabated.
Guardian Cities is a member of the Habitat III Journalism Project. Read more about the
project here