The Transformative Potential of the Right to the City : An Analysis of the Potential Contribution of the Right to the City in Formulating a Human Rights Response to Urban Socio-Economic Inequalities

The demographic patterns in developing countries have significantly changed in the recent few decades due to the impact of urbanization. The urbanization process has created new challenges; and the enormous divide between haves and have nots has become a defining feature of contemporary urban spaces. The advent of neo liberal globalisation and the integration of developing countries in to the global neo liberal matrix has resulted in exacerbating urban inequalities since the former has structured urban governance in a manner that further excludes the urban poor. The thesis analyses the contribution the notion the right to the city could make in forming a human rights response to the issue of urban inequality. The right to the city is an emerging idea in the international human rights and development discourse; the idea has entered the United Nations discourse through the work of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme; and also, has been legally recognized in several countries in the Americas. Identifying that the human rights discourse in general has been reluctant to address socio-economic inequality as a human rights problem, the thesis demonstrates that the egalitarian paradigm the right to the city promotes has the potential in broadening the existing conception of human rights by introducing the norm of material equality into the human rights imagination. Further, it argues that such a broadened human rights vision could contribute in transforming the exclusive nature of contemporary urban governance and nurture a more democratic form of decision making in the urban settings