Right to the City From Current to Ideal City

During recent years, with the loss of economic, political, cultural and social structures efficiency, urban chaos is obvious in all its aspects. Urban crisis manifests in claims of citizenship and more and more people talk about “Right to the City”. Actually, this approach provides an appropriate conceptual tool to criticize status quo of today’s cities. In addition, to achieve an ideal situation we can extract very rich and creative ideas from the concept of “Right to the City ". In other words, the “Right to the City” is both the issue of the current city (present city) and the issue of the ideal city (a city that should be).
Present study aims to develop the philosophical origin of this concept from the perspective of its Lefebvreian origin. We maintain that accumulation of capital in modern capitalist societies occurs through urbanization but at the same time, monitoring and supervising the city get out of the control of the citizens and the benefits resulted from this urbanization will be seized in favor of capital (public or private). Right to the City, in general, seeks to take back the control of monitoring and supervising and taking advantage from urbanization of capital.
Since nowadays the “Right to the City” is driving force of many social movements and legal reforms around the world, some practical experiences in this regard will be expressed briefly. Experiences that show “Right to the City" is a "civil and legal” demand. Consequently, it can be said that some failures of urban planning in Iran are the result of ignoring this Right. At the end of the article, after reviewing the content of Henri Lefebvre on the "Right to the City ", some issues will be listed that cover this concept concisely and comprehensively in Tehran.