Claiming the Right to the City: Rethinking Urban Transformations in Brazil
by Abigail Friendly (published by UBC Press, 2026)
The right to the city – the freedom for all to inhabit urban space, to occupy, govern, change, and enjoy the city, and to access its resources – is fundamental to quality of life and genuinely inclusive democracy. Claiming the Right to the City critically explores attempts to redefine Brazil’s planning model based on social justice.
The Brazilian experience of profound urban challenges over the past forty years has been characterized by a persistent division between a theoretically acknowledged right to the city and the reality of urban policy, planning, and practice, within the context of economic inequality and unequal rights. Abigail Friendly highlights the vital role of urban social movements and participatory planning, as well as the tools used in implementing progressive goals such as controlling urban vacancy and applying land value capture. Looking to the future, Friendly proposes an approach uniting institutions with bottom-up engagement of citizens, communities, and grassroots organizations to drive urban transformations.
Claiming the Right to the City provides insight into how the right to the city is localized in practice, offering lessons that are broadly applicable to cities around the world. As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, insights from Brazil can reveal lessons for the future.
This combination of theoretical discussion and practical insight will be immensely useful to academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines, from urban studies, planning, and urban sociology to geography and Latin American studies.
To order this book, see the UBC Press page or the flyer from UBC press.
The Brazilian experience of profound urban challenges over the past forty years has been characterized by a persistent division between a theoretically acknowledged right to the city and the reality of urban policy, planning, and practice, within the context of economic inequality and unequal rights. Abigail Friendly highlights the vital role of urban social movements and participatory planning, as well as the tools used in implementing progressive goals such as controlling urban vacancy and applying land value capture. Looking to the future, Friendly proposes an approach uniting institutions with bottom-up engagement of citizens, communities, and grassroots organizations to drive urban transformations.
Claiming the Right to the City provides insight into how the right to the city is localized in practice, offering lessons that are broadly applicable to cities around the world. As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, insights from Brazil can reveal lessons for the future.
This combination of theoretical discussion and practical insight will be immensely useful to academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines, from urban studies, planning, and urban sociology to geography and Latin American studies.
To order this book, see the UBC Press page or the flyer from UBC press.