PhDIn recent years, the ‘right to the city’ has emerged as a key concept and practice amongst both
academics and social movements around which to organise a response to the crisis of Fordist
production and political representation. In Spain this response has taken to the streets, with
millions of people coming together and shouting ‘They don’t represent us!’.
As a key site of both neoliberal urban governance and political insurgency, Barcelona provides
a powerful site through which to examine the relationships between urban social movements,
urban governance and struggles around the right to the city. In this thesis I build a (partial and
provisional) genealogy of the right to the city, examining the relevance of those struggles that
have emerged inside and against neoliberal governmentality since the early 1980s in an effort
to assemble the right to the city through the material combination of struggles around urban
production and citizenship rights.
To do this, I return to the relation between genesis and management as an uneven dialectic in
the production of rights; drawing on and building new connections between post-colonial studies,
autonomous marxist debates, critical studies of citizenship and urban studies to investigate
how strangers, outsiders and the governed challenge European capitalism from inside and assert
a different imagination of contemporary urban life.
I also explore my own role in these dynamics. In contrast to an understanding of academic
knowledge as analytical and objective representation, my position as both a militant and a researcher
provides the ground upon which I analyse social movements as a factory of concepts
and practices capable of assembling an instituent politics against neoliberal governmentalit
