Citizen Spaces: Experiments in Reclaiming the Right to the City

The physical and economic growth of large cities under late capitalism has been driven by the profit motives of the elite class of financiers, developers, and global scale wealth. This urbanization under capitalism can often eclipse broad and systemic efforts to consider the quality of life of all citizens. The rapid physical transformation of cities for profit can lead to increased lack of affordability, displacement of marginalized people, eradication of historically vibrant cultural zones and privatization of public space. The increased consumerism caused by capital-driven urban development can result in pacification of potentially revolutionary communities, cultivating an individualistic rather than collective culture. Citizen participation in action that transforms public space for community benefit can help re-establish these lost social bonds and promote collective empowerment. The “right to the city,” is a concept introduced by French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre in 1968, in response to the condition of urbanization under capitalism and its compromising effect on citizens’ rights. Drawing on Lefebvre, contemporary anthropologist David Harvey defines the right to the city as “a common rather than an individual right… [that] inevitably depends on the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization” (23). My thesis research aligns with Harvey’s definition of the right to the city and provides examples of grassroots participation and art and design activism that contribute to collective empowerment through the creation or transformation of urban public space. In addition to the condition of urbanization under capitalism, my thesis responds to contemporary academic research in political science. Participedia is an international academic collaboration researching public participation. This project fosters connections and community between activists, practitioners and scholars around the world and has developed an open source crowdsourcing platform allowing contributors to publish information about cases, methods and organizations in this field of study. I propose to 1) raise awareness in the Participedia community about grassroots participation and art and design activism through documentation on the platform, and 2) experiment with the production of visual media expanding the ways in which projects are represented on Participedia, encouraging citizens to get involved in public participation initiatives and potentially benefiting community groups. My thesis addresses this research question: How do initiatives of grassroots participation and art and design activism help citizens reclaim their right to the city and promote localized collective empowerment? To explore this inquiry at the community level, I launched experimental projects in four cities. I undertook exploratory research to get a broad sense of currently active grassroots participation and art and design activism initiatives before reaching out to selected community groups to collaborate with on experimental projects, outlined in detailed case studies. Through this work, I explored the reclamation of privatized space for public use in Madrid, Spain; increased neighbourhood safety in Kingston, Jamaica; protection of urban green space in Montreal, and the trend of temporary interventions, or “placemaking,” in Vancouver. As a final experiment, I initiated a public space activation called the Vancouver Bubble, exercising my own right to the city, transforming an underused site into a “citizen space” by creating opportunities for participation, dialogue and youth engagement within a temporary intervention of design activism. An outcome of my practice-based research includes the ongoing development of a methodology for collaborative media-based storytelling, through which I engaged with community groups to craft and share stories from their individual unique perspectives. I used 360° film technology to document and reflect on the site-specific nature of the initiatives explored. Production of visual media may also benefit community groups by encouraging more everyday citizens to get involved via channels such as Participedia.xyz. Finally, I propose four axes of participation to address the commonalities and distinctions between the sites of grassroots participation and art and design activism I explored in my thesis: 1) threatened versus safe tenancy, referring to site-specificity, 2) top-down versus grassroots initiatives, referring to the perspective of the organizers, 3) intervention versus site transformation, referring to action and duration, and 4) oppressed versus empowered communities, referring to outcomes and impact. The axes help to outline the characteristics of these site-specific urban contexts and provide a framework for understanding initiatives affecting the use of urban public space in ways that can contribute to the empowerment of citizens by promoting the right to the city. I also illustrate how understanding the way these aspects operate within their varied contexts lays the groundwork for future work in creating citizen spaces that reclaim the right to the city.