Achieving a Right to the City in Practice: Reflections on Community Struggles in Dublin

Abstract

The concept of the right city is strongly contested within urban theory and practice. Debate centres on what rights this entails, who the rights are for, and how the right to the city can be achieved in practice. Exploited and alienated urban inhabitants and social movements have drawn on the right to the city to challenge the impacts of financial crisis, austerity and deepening neoliberal urbanism. At the elite institutional level, UN agencies, development NGOs, and local and national governments have been critiqued for diluting and co-opting the emancipatory potential of the right to the city and using it to legitimise on-going processes of neoliberal governance. This paper draws on evidence gathered from struggles against austerity and neoliberal urbanism at a grassroots community level in Dublin, Ireland, to develop understandings of what it means to achieve the right to the city in practice. It makes the case for a greater focus on actually existing struggles (particularly of marginalised communities) rather than institutional frameworks. It also presents evidence of positive outcomes from human rights based approaches. This highlights the potential for community struggles to achieve the right to the city in practice. However the paper also shows that major challenges face marginalised communities in finding the resources and energy required to create and sustain city wide alliances.