Public space: Integration and exclusion in urban life

Abstract

Lately, Henri Lefebvre's famous slogan ‘the right to the city’ has been appropriated in revanchist terms: the right to the city now transpires as the right of the rich to walk the streets free from interfering poor and homeless ‘others’. Do the impoverished and disenfranchised, conflict and disorder, disruption and contradiction, have a place in, for example, the British Labour Party's ideal of an acceptable public space? Who's in and who's out? And what should be done about it?