Notes on the right to the city and immunization

Abstract

This text intends to register observations about the right to the city as seen under the lens of the understandings of community and immunity woven by Roberto Esposito, and understood from Henri Lefebvre as a point of convergence of the various struggles of the contemporary urban social movements that demand to take part and to work on the decisions about the city environment, along with other social instances. There are, in two apparently opposing urbanistic conceptions – the dynamics of the communities that claim the right to the city, and the dynamics of neoliberal urbanism, which aim at a valorization of the urban land and the good positioning of the city in the competitive international investment scenario – similarities regarding immunization processes that may lead to the denial of life. However, the right to the city differs itself and affirmes itself because it is the available instrument to make cities more just and democratic in a scenario of extreme inequalities and power disputes.