Right to the city; In search of a conceptual model

Right to the city is one of the controversial concepts introduced in the 1970s by the French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre. In recent decades, this concept has gained the attention of many city theoreticians and has formed various social movements in practice and helped issue some legal charters. Lefebvre considered the city as a social structure and believed that all the citizens have a right to the city. The goal of the current article is to recognize and analyze the concept of right to the city using the theoretical framework presented by Henri Lefebvre and reading the concrete instances of this concept within various urban movements and issued charters. Our study is descriptive research and to gather the data, we used a qualitative method and techniques such as document selection, expert opinion and thematic analysis of documents. Results indicate that the concept of right to the city includes ownership of the city by citizens and their participation in urban affairs. Therefore, major issues confronting this concept in creating high quality urban space are: urban governance, social inclusion, cultural diversity in the city, social freedoms and access to urban services for all residents.