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The right to the street and the right to the city: for bread, and roses too

Oikeus 3/2011 s. 313–325
3.11.2011
Asiantuntija-artikkeli

The essay tacks between an analysis of street agitation by the early twentieth-century radical labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, and contemporary attempts to legally banish unwanted people from urban public spaces in order to suggest that the right to the city – a focus of so much contemporary political activism and scholarly theorizing – depends upon the right to the street. Drawing on Lefebvre’s original formulations as well as a critical analysis of contemporary arguments about the right

to the city, the text suggests that if we focus on the conjoined struggle between the right to the street and right

to the city, we might begin to find a way to achieve of the IWW’s most cherished dreams: a world in which the exploited and oppressed can enjoy not only bread – their rightful share of material wealth – but roses too – a version of the good life.

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