The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a
right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an
individual right since the transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective
power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The suburbanization of the United States
was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a
radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and …

In 1987, came, Our Common Future, the report of the United Nations-sponsored World
Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) and the clarion call for sustainable
development. Some radical environmentalists claimed that sustainable development was an
oxymoron favored by big business interests to portray capitalism as ecologically benign. The
concept of sustainable development, said as, development that meets the needs of the
present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs …