Here comes a text from the pages of the latest NCR-07 [Ecology]: An interview with David Harvey by Pelin Tan and Ayşe Çavdar

I think people get muddled about the right to the city concept when they think it’s something that is given, up there… I think the right to the city is something that has to be struggled for and fought over and actually than discussed. Because it is always open for one group in population to claim their right to the city, that turns hegemonic. For example in many large cities we find the financiers, the developers and some very rich and influential people essentially dominate what happens in the city and if you go to them to say: ‘you don’t have a right to do that’ they say ‘of course we do, we live here we have the right to do that’. Just to take the example of New York city in 1970s, where the Rockefeller Brothers were adamant that they have the right to the city, they loved the city, they wanted it to be built in a different image and of course that led to exclusions. But there are always exclusions involved in any group that expresses its right against an other group that objects. So I would like to see for example; bourgeoisie excluded from the right to the city and the people to have the right to the city. I want to fill the idea of the right to the city -which I really call an empty signifier- with meaning. But the meaning is going to be set up by, lets say, popular organizations; for instance the homeless, the discriminated against the minorities…So right to the city is not sort of some beautiful ethics that than gets supplied across everybody. It is something that has to be fought over and fought for. So the only interesting question is who is going to get the right to the city, how it is struggled for and how that right gets defined.

I think the commons is a very important concept and it seems to me that we have to treat it as a political concept. It is about how we develop a common purpose. It is not simply about common usage, it is about developing a common purpose. I think it is getting more and more important then the question of who has the property rights and what kind of property rights there are: the private property rights, the collective property rights, or the state property rights… You know, all these kind of questions are technical questions whereas the big question for me is the political question: how do we achieve a common politics? And to do that we need to have a sort of a way of bringing people together and that means you need the spaces in which people can assemble. I am very interested in for example the problem in many cities right now is there is a lot of public spaces but you can’t actually turn them into political spaces where you actually start a common discussion. So, actually converting public spaces into common spaces of political discussion as happened with the occupation of Zuccotti Park as happened with the sort of occupation of steppes of pole that seems to me a very important part of the process of attempting to define a common purpose for what we are going to do in this city at this time, how are we going to have a common struggle and have a very clear idea of what the nature of the project is in that common struggle. That’s to me is the most important part, the political part. I don’t believe that you can actually pursue a lot of those objectives without having some sort of exclusions. I think that if you want to save some things from taken over by capital you have to enclose them. You think of some spaces like woman’s centers, community centers, they can be sort of heavens as part of a political process but they survive because they are enclosed in some way. For example Zapatistas enclosed their space and said we are the government of that space. So I think there is sometimes a mix up, in the commons literature which is anti-enclosure and I am not anti-enclosure at all, I am saying well you have got to be interested sometimes in enclosing things in order to protect them. Heterotopic space has to be protected. How do you protect that, you have to enclose it, only in that way it can be protected. Even anarchist communes by the way tend to have enclosures.