The post-socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe were often described as almost unanimously embracing the neo-liberal “shock therapies” applied after the fall of socialism in 1989-1990: whether convinced that there is no alternative, or unable to organize resistance in view of the precarious living conditions and the fragmentation of social bonds. And yet it was already in the early 1990s when the processes of gentrification and privatization of urban space as well as the emerging socio-spatial segregation in cities were opposed by local initiatives of inhabitants, increasingly joined by activists and professionals, including geographers, sociologists, architects, and lawyers. 

Coined in 1968 by the French Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre, the concept of the “right to the city” was an attempt to rethink left politics in view of the transformation of social classes in the post-war Western societies moving beyond the welfare state. Since then, the call for the “right to the city” became a platform of alliances between heterogeneous social movements including inhabitants’ cooperatives, trade unions, and radical political organizations. 

This reading and discussion group, which will gather in the Praga neighborhood in Warsaw, aims at accounting for the specificity of the claim to the “right to the city” in a post-socialist condition. What “Right” do we claim when we claim the “Right to the City”? What “City” do we imagine when we claim the “Right” to it?