The right to the city is an idea and a slogan first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book . This idea has been taken up more recently by social movements, thinkers, and certain progressive local authorities as a call to action to reclaim the city as a co-created space: a place for life detached from the growing effects that commodification and capitalism are proposed to have had over social interaction and the rise of posited spatial inequalities in worldwide cities throughout the last two centuries. Overview In his first inception of the concept, Lefebvre paid specific emphasis on the effects that capitalism had over “the city”, whereby urban life was downgraded into a commodity, social interaction became increasingly uprooted and urban space and governance were turned into exclusive goods. In opposition to this trend, Lefebvre raised a call to “rescue the citizen as main element and protagonist of the city that he himself had built” and to transform urban space into “a meeting point for building collective life”. Due to the inequalities produced by the rapid increase of the world urban population in most regions of the world, the concept of the right to the city has been recalled on several occasions since the publication of Lefebvre’s book as a call to action by social movements and grassroots organizations. In their appeal for “their right to the city”, local mobilizations around the world usually refer to their struggle for social justice and dignified access to urban life to face growing urban inequalities (especially in large metropolitan areas). The right to the city has had a particular influence in Latin America and Europe, where social movements have particularly appealed to the concept in their actions and promoted local instruments for advancing its concrete understanding in terms of policy-making at the local and even national level. A good proof on how the notion of right to the city has gained international recognition in the last years could be seen in the United Nations’ Habitat III process, and how the New Urban Agenda (2016) recognized the concept as the vision of “cities for all”. Lefebvre summarizes the idea as a "demand...[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". David Harvey described it as follows: Recent popular movements A number of popular movements, such as the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo in South Africa, the Right to the City Alliance in