11-10-2008

City-regions are becoming central economic and political territories in which a new division of labour is occurring between the states and the local authorities. This tendency has been particularly analysed by the economic literature but also by geography, sociology and political science. At the same time, there is a large literature on the general tendency towards the pluralization of urban decision systems in different institutional, cultural, political and economic contexts. To say it briefly, these processes (i.e. political rescaling and participative democracy at local level) generate a new “right to the city”: the capacity to influence the agendas of urban public institutions by using “appropriate” demands based on the formulation of rights recognized as legitimate by urban institutions. The on-going process of the constitution of an “urban citizenship” involves a set of social demands which are, by definition, contradictory in that sense that the “right to the city” must be linked to the social groups and classes using it in order to organize themselves, to generate collective identity and collective action. The work program of the Conference addresses a number of empirical subjects, all vectors of a “right to the city”. Its objective is to compare the effects of these dynamics on the content of urban policies and on the transformation of citizenship regimes.