Do We Have a Right to the City?

18 hours ago
6 min read

A review of Dominic Moulden’s photo show, “The Right to the City: Visualizing Home, Resistance, and Belonging,” at the Boston University Art Gallery

Ponder urban renewals’ successive march, the always-oncoming New Boston, rising rents, quashed city rebellions, Black Lives Matter movements in Ferguson, Baltimore, Minneapolis, New York (and the municipal murders they respond to), the People Before Highways movement, the Reconnecting Communities Grant program (to stitch back together communities rent asunder by highways), the consolidation of municipal economies, recent budget struggles in Boston which rolled back popular programs like youth employment, the Better Budget Alliance’s win in dedicating a small part of Boston’s city budget to a participatory process and direct fiscal decision-making.

Does it seem like we have a Right to the City? If not: Should we have a Right to the City? What would such a right entail? A right to housing, municipal education…a right to green space, a right to build…a right to embodiment, enmeshment, life outside of livelihood?

Further—via visiting scholar, photographer, and activist Dominic Moulden—do we have a Right to the Earth? In the midst of compounded ecological crises, and a litany of state polities eager to attract investment and construction contracts to build data centers against rising and resounding voices nationwide shouting their refusal of these plans; across ongoing land stewardship projects and proposals, largely initiated and stewarded by Black and indigenous communities; on the surface of sinking cities in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Finally—once more, via Moulden—what does it mean for us if the answers to our first and last questions are, No?

Moulden’s photo exhibition, “The Right to the City: Visualizing Home, Resistance, and Belonging,” which opened this past June with The Boston University Initiative on Cities, is named after Henri LeFebvre’s 1968 Le droit à la ville (The right to the city), a seminal text in urban planning; LeFebvre argues against a fateful consolidation of power and wealth, toward the establishment of right that city residents ought to have to direct activity, seek leisure, and shape the built environment to their own needs. Moulden's work wades into city iconography and geography across the globe to present juxtapositions, community histories, and narratives of gentrification, tenants’ organizing, and movement formation on the basis of establishing sovereignty and community control.

Along the back wall, presented in linear fashion, photographs reproduced on canvas document movements like the Federación Uruguaya de Cooperativas de Vivienda por Ayuda Mutua (FUCVAM), or the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives. Found in 1970, FUCVAM has become a mechanism through which community members are directly trained in construction to build housing—contributing their own labor to their respective cooperatives—in addition to planning and designing their own housing. Enabled by the passage of a national housing law passed in 1968 which formally recognizes cooperative development and collective ownership of developments, FUCVAM counts tens of thousand members among its ranks and builds sustainability and affordability immediately into Uruguay’s housing market. FUCVAM enacts a right to stay, and embodies a Right to the City (despite a codified right not existing on law books). Moulden presents The Feministas and The Brick Cutter (2026), two photos of women members of FUCVAM at work—organizing against imperialism at an annual Women’s Day March, and at a job site actively making the built environment.

Moulden’s work in this section of the show also pays special attention to Black land stewards. An urban farm in Puerto Rico (Maria’s Puerto Rico, 2018), a goat herder and three fishers in Grenada (Protecting the Land and the Goats and Fishing in Clean Waters, 2022); each photo, a glimpse into people-power enacted through caring work- and life-ways not rewarded by markets or adjudicated by law. In a panel conversation opening the show on June 12th, Moulden actively questioned rights-based frameworks like the “Right to the City,” and said that he did not believe such a right existed. Appealing to a lower-case-h humanity and humanism, like writers Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter, Moulden offered that we must not compare deprivations or depredations, that we may not be able to act on rights governments do not will us (and instead grant to developers and corporations capable of possession), that instead we must continue to build power to protect ourselves as a species in relationship to other species, in service of life.

The Resister, 2018 — *The Resister*, 2018

Through the rest of the exhibition, hung on walls askew in the center of the gallery, we see more densely urbanized scenes. Moulden depicts London’s high glass towers (The Skyline, 2018) as they loom behind council estates, calling to mind: the view of Boston’s skyline available to residents of Roxbury over the old Mandela Homes, residents of South Boston over Old Colony public housing projects, residents of Jamaica Plain atop the Mildred C. Hailey Apartments. New York City’s Hudson Yards landscape, also on view, reminds a viewer of Boston’s Seaport: formerly-industrially-zoned subdivisions remade into poorly-considered, post-modern playgrounds for the rich to park their capital. In a more tender moment, Moulden captures a photograph of Beverly Robinson (her story recorded by collaborator Loretta Lees): a tenant-organizer-by-force, who lived the majority of her life in public housing in London before she purchased her unit, only for her entire building to be re-claimed via eminent domain by her local housing council. At the time of the photoshoot, her building was slated for demolition, and Robinson was fighting for her right to remain. Her story calls to mind Mildred C. Hailey and Anna Mae Cole, tenant organizers in the public housing development popularly known as Bromley-Heath before its re-development and renaming in honor of Hailey. Hailey and Cole fought deteriorating conditions in their housing and resultant tensions in their communities, successfully cultivating tenant management and control of housing in their development (1). It is unclear from Beverly’s story whether or not she arrived at similar success.

Many of Moulden’s works ultimately attempt to answer yet another, more critical question, referenced in exhibition texts throughout the gallery: is gentrification a municipal crime? The title of an essay written by Moulden in 2020, this question calls up the harms committed through the organized abandonment and intentional neglect of Black neighborhoods, which produced the “slums” of the early twentieth century, slum removal and urban renewal (or negro removal) in the postwar period, and gentrification in the present. At the panel, Moulden wore a t-shirt commemorating the 20th anniversary of social psychologist Mindy Fullilove’s Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It. Fullilove’s book details how neighborhoods compose not just physical, but emotional fabric that we rely on. Reproducing memories from hundreds of Black residents who lived through urban renewal in Roanoke, Pittsburgh, and Newark, Fullilove argues that the impacts of uprooting are akin to bodily trauma, interrupting our individual and social mechanisms for release, advancement, and function because where we live and what happens there is bound up in who we are. In Moulden’s essay, citing Fullilove, he offers:

I have seen and felt the effects of these crimes upon communities. They carry the physical and psychological tolls of trauma. Who is perpetrating the crime? I have seen governments, developers, churches and other parties actively participate in the demise and destruction of Black working class homes and communities….The empire of capital must be challenged. The empire of capital values property over people, awards the super-rich with public benefits, and supports removing unhoused people and working-class people from prime real estate locations in the municipal city. What claims to the city do we have as Black working-class families? Who will join us in our claim that gentrification is a crime against humanity? How can we build and organize a strategy to highlight this claim? (2)

LeFebvre’s right to the city is exigent: he predicted that if such a right were not established, urban crises were imminent. In the same year as LeFebvre’s book was published, the May 1968 rebellion in Paris would bring his predictions to fruition. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination in April of the same year, and building tensions and rebellions in Black neighborhoods across the United States, both anticipated and followed LeFebvre’s prediction. The ensuing Black Power movement, as fellow panelist Dr. Karilyn Crockett argued, articulated its own calls for community control, exceeding what could be asked for to make claims and act on their own demands — an altogether different basis for organizing.

Despite its title, Moulden’s “The Right to the City,” is ultimately unconvinced; Moulden, too, presents additional bases for producing a city, and a world, that serves human life.

Footnotes:

(1) Karilyn Crockett, People Before Highways (University Of Massachusetts Press, 2018).

(2) Dominic T. Moulden, “‘Is Gentrification a Municipal Crime?’: Reflections and Strategies on ‘Urban Activism: Staking Claims in the 21St Century City’,” Radical Housing Journal 4, no. 1 (May 31, 2021): 277–85, https://doi.org/10.54825/gdar8237.

Alula Hunsen (he/him) is an Editorial Manager at the Boston Ujima Project, working on narrative-building towards liberatory urban futures.