The right to the city concept verified in a Jerusalem neighbourhood

What is it about?

Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’ was an expression of a new politics of citizenship, residency and above all the right to urban life. We thus build our argument in this paper on the Lefebvre concept and through the case study of Kufr Aqab, the northernmost neighbourhood of the occupied city of Jerusalem. In order to systematically displace Palestinian Jerusalemites and to achieve the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the right to urban life and any sort of ‘right to the city’ have been completely denied.

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Why is it important?

But in the context of such prolonged occupation and citizenship deprivation, will inhabitants realise and assert their right or will they drift further away from acknowledging and attaining it, and therefore cause irreversible damage to their identity, urban space and social interactions? How can these ‘stubborn realities’ (Yiftachel, 2006, p. 213) of lawlessness and continuous abuse of power be a place of empowerment for inhabitants to claim their own right to the city?