“Right to the city” as a right is a ‘field’ that in and of itself consists of collaborations between different ‘fields’ such as human rights, tenant rights, land use, democratic government, participatory democracy, minority rights, affordable housing – the list goes on. It relies so heavily on interactions between these different fields that it cannot in fact exist without them. Right to the City Alliance (hereafter ‘RTTC’), the NGO, is similarly situated. RTTC depends on all kinds of organisations, from social justice groups like Black Lives Matter to alternative housing models like the Dudley Street Neighbourhood Initiative, to best guide them in drafting research and policy, in educating, and in shaping their campaigns and events. RTTC is, in an abstract way, a glue that ties these various fields together in pursuit of an ideal, beyond-market, community stabilised environment where every citizen can thrive fairly.
However, what RTTC is actually doing at this moment is slightly narrower. Currently, and for the past few years, there has been an intense focus on housing and community stabilisation as the fundamental step towards the ideals of “right to the city.” Most of my work at RTTC so far has involved reaching out to various community land trusts (CLTs) and alternative housing and land models like the Champlain Housing Trust, support organisations such as Causa Justa and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, as well as tenants unions, community governments etc. RTTC is actively focusing on bringing together these various groups and ideas to collaboratively and democratically work towards a vision of a world in which every person has access to land/housing and can participate in the decision making process of the environment they are in.
Thus, the “field” that I am plunging into right now is one that grapples with issues of land, housing, rent, homeownership, community control and community stabilisation. More succinctly, I am looking at housing through a social justice lens (think David Harvey and Peter Marcuse). What is so revolutionary about the right to the city, I think, is that it connects so many different struggles and movements and offers land and housing as a foundational step towards a solution. But precisely because it exists as a collaboration of so many different kinds of movements, its bounds are not tightly in place and can be easily ruptured to accommodate all kinds of organisational and individual action. To be completely honest, the biggest boundary I see is the financial boundary: I think that if social justice organisations like RTTC had better funds, the boundaries within which is must operate would be even more porous than they already are.
I’d like to hear more about your hypothesis that more financing would lead to even more porousness in the coalition of RTTC allies. Why do you think this is so? I think it’s really interesting that RTTC provides this interdisciplinary (for lack of a better term) vision that brings together more issue-based organizations around housing and land justice. But I wonder whether this vision stretches them too thin? And, on the flipside, does it also lack capacity to address other injustices, such as racism, environmental degradation, and gender inequality? Or are these areas blended into the vision and practice of RTTC fairly well?