









































Introduction.  Why a right to the city? 
Before there were cities, it is hardly likely that 

anyone ever expressed the thought that they have a 
right to one; and in the roughly six-thousand-year 
history of urban environments, no such idea of a 
right to the city was formulated until the French 
Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre proposed just 
this, in 1968.  And when Lefebvre did so, this was 
in energetic but rather vague fashion, as much a 
rallying cry for the disaffected and marginalized as 
the expression of a clear-cut moral or legal concept 
on which to base detailed social design or change.  
Vague or not, Lefebvre’s proposal found great 
favor among urban planners, international civil 
servants, public advocates, and others—somewhat 
independent of political or economic bent.  What is 
the attraction—why do some believe that there is a 
right to the city?

In what follows, I sketch a version of the right 
to the city (RTTC) that I take to be (a) feasible, (b) 
generic, and so (c) broadly amenable to many of 
its adherents; further, I suggest how it is that this 
entails special sorts of responsibilities or obligations 
for architects and others tending to our built 
environment and the spaces—especially public 
space—so structured and defined. Along the 
way, I provide a brief account of some historical 
motivations for embracing the right to the city, as 
well as reasons for endorsing my generic account.  
For the moment, I offer the quick suggestion that 
typical reasons for supporting a right to the city 
are grounded in traditional rights considerations: 
for one, benefits of urban life point to a positive 

Architectural Responsibilities 
and the Right to a City

Saul Fisher



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right, along the lines of an entitlement; and for another, dangers and 
impediments to life—and quality of life—in the city point to a negative 
right, along the lines of freedoms from harm and liberties to voluntary 
engagements.  How all this has a particularly urban focus and character, 
and how such a right or rights translate into specifically architectural 
responsibilities, depends at least in part on the sorts of things cities are and 
how they are constituted, or so I will argue. I begin, though, with a set of 
ground rules for any putative right to the city, basic principles as such one 
should uphold and not violate.

 1. Right to the city: initial parameters, historical background, and a proposal
a. Assumptions.
I start with a small set of parametric assumptions about what a right to 

the city should look like, which thereby provide ground rules for crafting 
such a right.  I take these assumptions as more or less self-evident or, at 
least, as relatively obvious candidate parameters.   

THE GOOD OR THE BEST CITY.  First, the right to the city is a right 
to a particular range of possible cities with desirable or requisite 
characteristics.  A right to a city which guaranteed no more than an 
urban hellscape would be useless, cynical ‘right.’ Note that this suggests 
that RTTC is, broadly speaking, an entitlement or claims right, where the 
positive good is a city that, for those with the rights to it—presumably 
its citizens—is in the balance a place more good than bad to live and 
work in.  A further variation in this direction is to posit a RTTC that 
guarantees the best possible version of whatever city to which the right 
pertains.1

COMMUNAL. Second, RTTC is a community-focused, publicly 
oriented right, which individuals hold but as pertains to their current 
or prospective group membership qua urban citizens.2 It’s unclear that 
hermits, survivalists, rural dwellers, and exurbanites have RTTC; and 
the case of suburbanites is marginal, an intriguing case given their 
symbiotic relationship with the city.3 In short, RTTC is a right attaching 
to people who live in cities, hence live together in densely-populated 
communities. Given a communal orientation, RTTC should likely reflect 
historical, heritage, cultural and emotional motivations and stakes of 
the groups in question, with corresponding entitlements. As I argue, 
however, positing group claims rights does not entail all and only group 
obligations; further, the optimal way to meet such claims may not be in 
the aggregate, that is, not by the city as a whole entity but through the 
actions and choices of its parts and constituent members.4 



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FUTURE-FACING. Third, RTTC is forward-
looking. Any rights such as we claim are not 
necessarily—and not limited to—the city as it 
exists now, but as it will exist in the future.  This 
is partly a function of the imperfections of cities 
and a RTTC claim on the best possible city.  But it’s 
also a reflection of the city’s dynamic character—
its shifting and growing over time, and becoming 
more and less accessible, more and less capable 
of housing or otherwise serving its citizens, more 
and less well arranged to promote the good life.

Taken together, these parameters tell us that a 
RTTC should provide those with greatest investment 
in the city—the citizens—with guarantees to 
ongoing improvements and enhancements of 
goods and engagements, as well as amelioration 
or elimination of harms, such that quality of life 
progresses rather than stagnates or declines, so that 
an urban life is a worthy and rewarding one.

b. The Lefebvre Construal and Alternate Takes
Looking at actual, historical articulations of a 

RTTC—from Lefebvre onward—we see some degree 
of conformity with these parameters, at least in 
spirit, and if only in one or another fractional form.  
Lefebvre, for his part, while initially giving us RTTC, 
may not be its best proponent. First, as Loren King 
and others have noted, his Marxism makes for poor 
rights advocacy.5 The classic Marxist sees rights as a 
frivolity of bourgeois democratic politics, detached 
from realities of material goods distributed and 
controlled by the capital class. Second, and more 
compellingly for the non-Marxist, he does not 
say that in which a RTTC consists nor, as Attoh 
notes, how it would work out in practice.6 It’s not 
surprising that, on a Marxist reading, we aren’t told 
about particular entitlements or liberties. At all 
events, we are left with the question of what, quite, 
this is a right to. Nor are we told who has these 
rights, though it is fair to assume that, for Lefebvre, 

    LEFEBVRE, 
FOR HIS PART, 

WHILE INITIALLY 
GIVING US THE 

RIGHT TO THE CITY, 
MAY NOT BE 

ITS BEST 
PROPONENT. 

“

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this is primarily interesting as a right insofar as it represents an unfulfilled 
commitment to the dispossessed and the working class. One thing Lefebvre 
does tell us, on the other hand, is that those who have RTTC have it because 
they are participants in construction of the city as an urban project of 
living and working together.7 This is a crucial observation for just about 
any version of an RTTC as it highlights the reasons that cities came into 
being and continue to grow as the dominant form of human settlement:  
cities exist for the advancement of material and cultural wellbeing. His 
point is that intentionally and intensely concentrating populations in the 
same places—namely, cities—introduces claims on how people should live 
and prosper in those contexts.  

Of course, not all is well in the city.  Another thing Lefebvre tells us—
following his Marxist-style analysis—is that while citizens build the city 
and gain the benefits of living in the urban environment, they are also 
exploited by the capital class in so doing and are alienated from the city 
though it is their own project.8 Accordingly, RTTC for Lefebvre consists 
in a right for urban citizens to direct life in the city as engaged with, and 
unalienated from, their urban environment.9  With these few and imprecise 
notions, there is much room for interpretation and variation.  For example, 
we might direct or shape life in a city so as to not be alienating through 
direct behavioral interventions like rules, laws, intentional cultural shifts, 
and the like—but alternatively we might think it more effective to deploy 
environmental interventions as crafted in architectural and planning 
design.

Two broad traditions have taken up the Lefebvrian RTTC, also focusing 
on the city as the increasingly principal context of human settlement and 
the greatest source of wealth, creativity, power, as well as other human 

Emile Aillaud, La Grande Borne, Grigny (1971)



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phenomena, productions, and endeavors.10 For one, 
Marxists have tended to extrapolate from or build on 
Lefebvre’s view within their set of conventions, for 
example, by explaining the role of surplus value in 
urban productivity and positing the RTTC as a right 
to that value and its management.11 For another, 
a range of urban planners, geographers, political 
activists, and others have articulated more specific 
rights as they take to realize a vision of eliminating, 
punishing and disenfranchising injustices, such as 
Lefebvre associated with alienation and exploitation 
in the city or by its capital class. Examples of 
such specific rights include rights to housing, 
transportation, communications, participatory 
decision-making, participatory urban design, and 
protection from harms (e.g., excessive state force). 
While stimulated by Lefebvre’s critique, however, 
these latter views generally assume neither diagnoses 
nor solutions along Marxist lines. As with the 
Lefebvrian proposal, the latter, non-Marxist views 
stay within the lines of the parametric assumptions 
laid out here, motivated by a goal-state, sensitive to 
the dynamism of the city, and communally oriented.  
Yet they also move beyond Lefebvre, in concretely 
specifying goods, services, liberties, or freedoms to 
which citizens have a right qua citizens.

c. A Generic Proposal.
A third approach is to craft a generic RTTC that, 

while also inspired by Lefebvre, is not wedded to his 
framework, to Marxist tenets, or to any of the specific 
entitlement or liberty-oriented rights in particular 
as may also be inspired by that framework. To this 
end, consider a traditional view of rights (following, 
e.g., Hohfeld)12 as comprises the positive and the 
negative, emphasizing claims on entitlements on 
one hand and ensuring maintenance of liberty and 
protection from harm on the other.  A more recent 
addition to this array in the rights literature has 
it that, in addition to attending to concerns of or 
for individuals, a complete range of rights reflects 

    THE RIGHT 
TO THE CITY 

FOR LEFEBVRE 
CONSISTS IN A 

RIGHT FOR URBAN 
CITIZENS TO DIRECT 

LIFE IN THE CITY 
AS ENGAGED WITH, 
AND UNALIENATED 

FROM, THEIR URBAN 
ENVIRONMENT. 

“

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concerns of or for communities as aggregate parties.  Along these lines, and 
in pursuit of a maximalist right to the city, we would likely want that right 
to comprise constituent sub-rights as advance claims, meet communitarian 
concerns, and guarantee liberties.13  

I propose that this basic taxonomy points to an umbrella conception of 
a right to the city that includes at least these basic sub-rights:  urban access, 
as entitlement claim; urban inclusion, as community right; and urban 
flourishing, as a liberties-assuring and freedom-from-harms right. A full-
blown defense of these sub-rights is beyond the present scope; here I note a 
few definitional points and take note of one common denominator relative 
to urban public space. First, access is particularly suitable as a fundamental 
entitlement or claims right in the urban context because the city’s density 
and intensity is not only a positive economically and culturally but a 
negative as well, building and accelerating scarcity of resources—be they 
necessary or merely desirable. Insofar as scarcity is managed by reference 
to moral or justice considerations, we want a right to access the city’s 
resources as a guarantee of moral or just distribution, for example, to 
protect those least likely to secure access otherwise. Second, inclusion is 
suitable as a community right in the urban context because the purpose 
of cities, at root, is to bring people together for commerce and culture—

such that marginalizing and excluding people is antithetical to the core 
urban goals. Hence we want a right that serves to guarantee that, even 
if living in distinctive communities for solidarity purposes,14 all citizens 
are included in the broader urban community to the extent that they 
choose or as is otherwise socially optimal. Much more may be said about 
what inclusion entails here. Suffice it to mention, in this context, various 

Police Raid in Grigny, quartier de la Grande Borne (2016). 



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forms of openness, availability, and welcoming as 
comprise but are not limited to: involvement in 
decision-making of import to the urban whole 
or significant parts thereof; participation in and 
consumption of the urban host culture and other 
constituent cultures; access to economic and social 
opportunities of the city; and engagement with 
infrastructure and networks of the city. And as a 
third sub-right, flourishing is suitable as a liberties-
assuring and freedom-from-harms right in the 
urban context because the city only flourishes—
e.g., economically, socially, culturally—when its 
citizens can flourish. This in turn requires a negative 
right or rights of individuals and communities to 
enjoy protection from harms and liberties to act in 
ways that promote thriving and success, as well as 
a positive right to such entitlements as are accorded 
to city dwellers and promote citizen success and 
thriving.15 

It merits noting that, as a common denominator, 
all these sub-rights point to, and may be exploited 
to sustain, the broad claim of the urban dweller 
on public space.  For example, city dwellers have a 
right to access public space, as a scarce commodity 
more typically contracted than expanded by urban 
development; city dwellers may only realize a right 
to urban inclusion if there is sufficient and fitting 
public space in which to freely commune; and 
the city and its dwellers can only truly flourish—
optimize their thriving and success—where citizens 
may pursue work, study, and leisure beyond their 
own private spaces—free from the limits of solitude 
and constraints on personal room to move and 
share, e.g., ideas, innovation, or culture.  This 
picture is consonant with at least one prominent 
RTTC view that takes city-wise rights to primarily 
consist in rights to public space.16

To be sure, this is a very general account of only 
three possible sub-rights of a RTTC. Others might be 
articulated; these have the merit of accounting for a 
broad range of urban life. To see this, as well as how 



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these rights may be engaged, it’s helpful to consider cases where they are 
not, that is, where the rights are not recognized or else are recognized but 
infringed. Thus, we have:

DEVELOPER. Rita, a major developer in a major city, is planning a 
giant housing and commercial development of a large area of the city 
heretofore left in a state of disrepair and disuse. Elected officials have 
given carte blanche to Rita to develop the site however they see fit. The 
public has been left out of any semblance of a decision-making process. 
Operative RTTC sub-rights here concern inclusion and community.

STREET GANG. A new, violent STREET GANG menaces a previously 
prosperous area, and the residents are afraid to leave their houses. Police 
and social workers are ineffective and, while the gang grows in popularity 
and financial success, the neighborhood loses its vibrant street life and 
spirals downward as a desirable place to live. The operative RTTC sub-
right here, as highlighted by their violation or neglect, pertains to 
flourishing. Note, however, that in STREET GANG, the scenario need not 
have been located in a city; the setting could have been suburban or 
even rural. We can fix this in the following scenario:

PUBLIC HOUSING GANG. As in STREET GANG, public security in the 
area deteriorates. Unlike the generic location in STREET GANG, though, 
this scenario is specifically set in urban public housing, where the 
density of population heightens the probability of criminality, and 
the deteriorating security environment induces social, economic, and 
psychological depression. Operative RTTC sub-rights here are related to 
flourishing, specifically in urban contexts.

MÉTRO. Jean-Marie waits at a métro station for a train that never 
arrives. Unbeknownst to him, the city has discontinued that train line 
and is preparing to demolish the station shortly.  Henceforth Jean-Marie 
will need to walk to work, 7 km away. The operative RTTC sub-right 
here concerns entitlement, specifically to affordable and convenient 
mass transit service in a modern city.

These cases give a small taste of the diversity of scenarios where quality 
of life, integration and inclusion, and just benefits of city life—all as 
particular to urban contexts—are degraded for some parties X because of 
the actions or inactions of other parties Y. (In addition to these negative 
scenarios, other sorts of scenarios will highlight a positive picture, wherein 
RTTC-type rights are realized or sustained; see Appendix A.) Two points 
merit our attention in all these cases. For one, such cases arise in specifically 
urban contexts, and because of the nature of people living and working 



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together—which, as we have noted, is largely due 
to density and intensity of populations and their 
interactions. For another, the dereliction of Y as the 
cause of the failure to realize or sustain X’s rights 
points to Y’s responsibilities or obligations to X and 
all other citizens relative to the corresponding RTTC 

sub-rights as having not been realized or sustained 
in such cases.  In brief, as the dereliction of Y 
prevents the relevant sub-rights of X from being 
satisfied, we sense that Y is to blame, that is, to be 
held responsible.

Before moving on, let’s revisit the proposed 
parameters for a viable RTTC, namely, that such a 
right should promote the best possible city, should 
be communal in orientation, and should be future-
facing given the organic and not-so-organic change 
in the life of a city. All three sub-rights proposed 
here—to access, inclusion, and flourishing—
are contributing and perhaps necessary factors 
for optimizing the city and city life. Further, 
access and inclusion are manifestly community- 
and communally-oriented. It may be harder to 
specify that or how these particular sub-rights are 
constitutive of a future-facing RTTC, though it is 
also hard to imagine articulating or satisfying any 
future-facing RTTC that fails to build upon, or at 
least recognize, prior commitments to access, 
inclusion, and flourishing of urban dwellers.

2. Identifying and assigning responsibilities or obligations
So far, we have the picture of a broad RTTC as an 

umbrella right, comprising at least three sub-rights, 
including a right to entitlements, community, 
and flourishing. What attaches these rights to the 
city context in particular is a function of urban 
conditions, most prominently a population density 
that entails or generates problems, needs, and 
desiderata, that is, the stuff of special rights. And—
as is traditionally held relative to rights generally—
satisfaction or advancement of such RTTC sub-rights 
relies on parties having relevant responsibilities 

    ARCHITECTS 
AND THOSE 

WITH SIMILAR 
OCCUPATIONS ARE 

HIGHLY VISIBLE 
IN THIS REGARD, 

AS THEY PLAN 
AND SHAPE 

THE PHYSICAL 
AND BROADLY 
EXPERIENTIAL 

CHARACTERISTICS 
OF THE CITY. 

“

”



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or obligations. In this domain, failure to meet those responsibilities or 
obligations results in citizens failing to flourish, to attain or maintain 
community membership, or to receive such goods or services as are 
expectable in a justly ordered urban life.

Two principal tasks arise relative to talk about rights-wise responsibilities 
or obligations:  first, the what—identifying those responsibilities or 
obligations corresponding to particular rights; and second, the who—
identifying the parties with significant responsibilities or obligations 
in this regard. Both tasks represent complex questions with dizzying 
arrays of possible answers—as many as there are variables factoring into 
urban planning and design and city management, financing, servicing, 
and so on. One specific challenge in identifying and assigning RTTC-
wise responsibilities or obligations is the great diversity of urban actors 
(agents) pursuing different tasks relevant to the wide variety of sub-rights, 
in providing goods and services, promoting inclusion, or facilitating 
flourishing. Thus, politicians, bureaucrats, social services, corporate and 
small business owners, educators, health providers, public safety personnel, 
and many others populate a long list of people with such responsibilities. 

Among these professions and roles, architects and those with similar 
occupations (urban planners, urban designers, etc.)—whom I’ll refer to 
as ‘architectural agents’—are highly visible in this regard, as they plan and 
shape the physical and broadly experiential characteristics of the city.Indeed, 
there is a special moral claim on architectural agents relative to RTTC-wise 
responsibilities and obligations:  they draw the contours of possible ways 

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that citizens can organize and conduct their lives 
and work in the city, and in this way they support 
or prevent the possible pursuit of activities by all 
other agents as may contribute to the satisfaction 
of RTTC-wise responsibilities and obligations. This 
sort of meta-responsibility is additional to their 
ground-level RTTC-wise responsibilities in the urban 
context.

In this set of meta-responsibilities, however, 
architectural agents are not alone. One other family 
of actors with similar meta-responsibilities is the 
financial services industry, without whom nothing 
is possible in city life, including realization of 
architectural plans. So architects’ responsibilities 
may be outweighed by those of others with greater 
power to determine the fate of cities and popular 
rights to them. Even if not outpaced in such fashion, 
architects are clearly not the sole actors responsible 
for realization of RTTC-wise sub-rights, whether at 
the ground-level or the meta-level.

A further difficulty in assigning RTTC-wise 
responsibilities to architectural agents concerns the 
temporal. The city and its population shift over 
time, and with demographic, social, economic, and 
other shifts come changes in the identity and nature 
of those holding the right to the city, and the array 
of sub-rights to which they may justly lay claim. 
Thus it is unclear to whom architects of a given 
moment might have responsibilities—particularly 
in accounting for future population shifts—or 
how the duration of such responsibilities should be 
gauged.  

A third challenge in this regard concerns the 
appropriate degrees of RTTC-wise responsibility to 
be shouldered by architectural agents. For example, 
it cannot be fair to assign such responsibilities to 
individual architectural agents, however influential, 
relative to the entirety of a city, even if—as with 
Oscar Niemeyer and Brasilia—they have designed 
the city’s basic plans and major structures.  Nor 
is it fair, conversely, to assign such responsibilities 



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to the architectural professions in collective fashion, for we then excuse 
each architect from standard individual obligations. Neither individual 
architects nor architects in the aggregate considered as the profession overall 
can assume or be assigned the full range of such RTTC-wise responsibilities 
as we would apportion to architectural agents.

3. A compositionalist approach to city-wise rights and responsibilities.
How, then, to apportion RTTC-wise responsibilities or obligations to 

architectural agents—by what means and to what degree? My proposal 
reflects a key aspect of the aforementioned scenarios (DEVELOPER, public 
HOUSING GANG, and MÉTRO): while some such instances where rights are 
upheld or denied have a system-wide or city-wide origin or developmental 
path or set of consequences, many—perhaps most—such instances arise 
out of highly localized circumstances. In short, RTTC-related scenarios arise 
as much relative to a bus stop or a single office tower as they do relative to 
the urban water system or the city’s entire zoning code. It is those highly 
localized scenarios where architects and others with architectural agency 
have the most frequent and robust obligations relative to RTTC and its 
family of sub-rights.

To make this suggestion work, such that architects and other architectural 
agents can assume—at the micro-scale—the sorts of obligations we take 
to follow from RTTC, we need to build on two more fundamental claims. 
First, we need to show that architectural agents have a kind of efficacy 
to begin with that allows them to meaningfully contribute to realization 
or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights.  Second, we need to show that what 
architectural agents do as individuals or in small groups at the micro-scale 
rolls up to the realization or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights.

The first fundamental claim is, at root, an empirical point. In the early 
interactions between architects and environmental psychologists (1970s), 
there were worries about the feasibility of ‘architectural determinism,’ the 
view that architectural forms and the spaces they shape can have regular and 
predictable effects on behaviors of those experiencing the forms and spaces. 
While there is cause for caution as elsewhere in the behavioral sciences, a 
wealth of scientific and commercial data supports the general notion that 
our range of choices and actions may be influenced environmentally—and 
that even subtle design interventions in the built environment may shift 
behaviors.17 Insofar as realization or sustaining of RTTC sub-rights entails 
enabling, encouraging, or preventing citizens from undertaking particular 
behaviors, the empirical accounts of ‘architectural determinism’ tell us how 
architectural agents take on such responsibility.

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drawing on (1) a picture of RTTC in which our 
judgment that either the umbrella right or sub-
rights are satisfied is divisible by spatial and 
temporal regions, together with (2) a compositional 
notion of architectural objects.  First, we know that 
we can divide judgment about rights satisfaction 
by regions (spatial or temporal) given that rights 
are mostly, if not always, realized only partially 
and to varying degrees depending on location and 
timeframe. While this is typically seen as a real-world 
imperfection for any rights regime, this feature also 
allows us to think about satisfaction of rights in 
such limited domains—of a given place or a given 
time—as successes within those domains. And 
since, in the case of realizing or satisfying RTTC-wise 
sub-rights, we cannot expect architectural agents 
(whether as individuals or in the aggregate) to 
satisfy such rights—either across the whole of a city 
or for the entire duration of its existence—spatially 
and temporally modest targets are called for.

Second, in a compositional account of 
architectural objects, we have a ready instrument 
for taking apart the city along spatial or temporal 
lines—such that we can reasonably apportion 
RTTC-wise responsibilities to architectural agents 
at a level (spatially) and over a duration for which 
expectations and accountability are realistic goals. 
A compositional account of architectural objects, as 
relative to cities in particular, says that urban built 
environments are composed of built structures as 
unitary individuals or collections thereof, such 
that, as aggregates of those unitary or collective 
individuals, cities are shaped by those individuals. 
The idea is that cities, as wholes, are shaped by the 
parts they comprise.18 This is a three-dimensional, 
spatial picture, but it is trivial to expand this 
compositionalism to a fourth, temporal dimension:  
the character of cities is shaped over time by earlier 
instantiations of the urban built environment, both 
where the earlier elements of that environment 
survive, as well as where they cease to exist and 

    PUTTING THESE 
TWO ELEMENTS 
TOGETHER, WE 

CAN REASONABLY 
APPORTION 

RESPONSIBILITY TO 
ARCHITECTURAL 

AGENTS FOR RTTC-
WISE SUB-RIGHTS. 

“

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make way for new elements.  Compositionalism contributes to our ability 
to judge the satisfaction of RTTC-wise sub-rights by giving us a means of 
gauging whether built structures (or collections thereof ) may help to raise 
or lower satisfaction of city-wise rights within bounds—that is, on a partial 
or fractional basis.  The idea is to then ‘roll up’ (sum across) that degree 
of rights-satisfaction, by taking those structures as parts contributing to 
the city or its regions one piece at a time, creating conditions for, e.g., 
strengthening inclusion, providing just benefits attached to city life, and 
promoting flourishing.

Putting these two elements together, we can reasonably apportion 
responsibility to architectural agents for RTTC-wise sub-rights. The first 
element is recognizing that architectural agents can shape behaviors in ways 
that contribute to or detract from realization of rights special to the urban 
context, e.g., to housing or mass transit or access to cultural resources. 
The second element associates satisfaction of such given sub-rights with 
particular buildings or collections of buildings, or sets of buildings 
at a particular time. In this way, we can tie realization of rights, and 
corresponding responsibilities to that end, to particular architectural agents 
where they are actually in a position to assume such levels of responsibility. 
Further, compositionalism allows us to assemble an aggregated reading of 
architectural agents’ successes, on a city-wide basis, in furthering the RTTC 
of a given city’s citizens —as spread across different sub-rights as well as the 
component parts of the city.

4. Problems
Here are at least three prospective problems with this view. First, 

architects generally accept a range of responsibilities, of course, though 
not in an absolute sense that some advocates associate with at least some 
rights in the moral and political philosophical tradition.19 Consider, 
in this vein, city-wide and system-wide scenarios as invoke RTTC sub-
rights and recognizably feature city-wide and system-wide agents with 
corresponding obligations we might take to be absolute per their rights-
wise stipulation. For example, a RTTC sub-right to access to healthcare 
in the urban context (relative to, say, asthma prevention and mitigation 
in distressed neighborhoods) may well be recognizable as an absolute 
right—one not defeated by other considerations. On the other hand, 
for scenarios that invoke RTTC sub-rights on the local or building level, 
the responsible architectural agents are unlikely to have corresponding 
obligations in any traditionally absolute sense. Given that utility is a core 
professional and heritage-wise goal for architects, obligations are pro tanto 
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for the greater good. So, there is at least a cultural 
gap here, if we think that architectural agents have 
indefeasible obligations relative to RTTC sub-rights.

Second, I have suggested here that 
compositionalism gives us a means of summing 
across judgments of architectural agents as satisfying 
(or not) RTTC sub-rights in given spatial or temporal 
regions, rather than tying satisfaction of rights to 
the city-wide scale alone and then unrealistically 
pinning responsibilities for such on architectural 
agents (singly or all together). But we might not 
think that we can speak meaningfully of rights-
satisfaction as the sort of thing one can sum across, 
even if we can differentially gauge levels of rights 
satisfaction across distinctive spaces and times. 
How we see this summation problem will turn, I 
suspect, on whether we think of rights regimes as 
meaningfully satisfied at all if they are fractionally 
satisfied only in this or that neighborhood, only by 
this or that built structure.  We can only sum across 
rights satisfaction for the city as a whole in this way 
if we rule out the notion that rights only satisfied 
for some populations are not satisfied universally 
hence not satisfied at all.

Finally, it may be that I have insufficiently 
demarcated responsibilities attaching to architects 
in particular—as against those attaching to other 
‘architectural agents’ such as urban designers or 
planners. These are, after all, different roles. One 
way to carve up the attendant responsibilities, 
for example, might reflect the scale of the 
corresponding design tasks.20 That said, the borders 
of architectural and urban design and planning 
disciplines are famously porous, especially in the 
domain of localized urban projects such as London’s 
Barbican Centre, New York’s Lincoln Center, or 
Paris’s La Villette. So, practice may point to a need 
for vagueness here. A more pertinent response is 
principled: the compositionalist framework I have 
drawn upon should do the work of apportioning 
responsibilities for satisfying RTTC to different sorts 



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of architectural agents in accordance with (a) the urban design element as 
distinguished possibly by scale but equally possibly by function, systemic 
role, liability, or still other factors; and (b) the attendant RTTC sub-rights as 
come into play with each such design element. Even similar ‘puzzle pieces’ 
as compose a city will likely prompt different responsibility assignments to 
different roles across, for example, urban cultures and contexts.21

5. Conclusion
I close with a brief revisit of the STREET GANG and PUBLIC HOUSING 

GANG scenarios, which taken together, I propose, highlight the character 
of architectural agent’s RTTC-wise responsibilities in the specifically urban 
context. Recall that the difference between those two scenarios is that the 
first could take place in all manner of locations, whereas the second is at 
least in part the product of a city setting, which from an environmental 
psychology perspective has gone very much awry. At issue is (a) the degree 
to which a built environment that resembles an urban rat trap for human 
beings may accelerate, worsen, and perpetuate criminal activity or other 
socially deviant behaviors by some of the local citizenry, and (b) the degree 
to which architects and planners of said environment have responsibilities 
for designing in ways so as to lessen the probabilities of such behaviors 
and their consequences. If citizens of all backgrounds and housing settings 
have rights to flourishing in the city, as entails a further right to public 
safety, then we have identified some level of responsibility for realizing 
such rights as may be apportioned to architectural agents. This is, to be 
sure, only a piece of the puzzle: others will have relevant responsibilities 
and these are just some few RTTC-wise sub-rights among many others.  But 
if we start at this level of analysis, we will be en route to identifying the 
many puzzle pieces of responsibility attached to the actions and choices of 
architects relative to the fullest range of RTTC-wise sub-rights.  That will 
give us a picture of ways that, at the micro-scale, architects and those in 
related professions contribute to realizing or thwarting realization of rights 
to the city.

Appendix A. Scenarios of rights secured and sustained.
CULTURAL FESTIVAL. A marginalized immigrant community sustains 

its cultural traditions in private homes and makeshift community 
spaces. The city invites community members to participate in the 
summer cultural festival in the park. Regular cultural programming by 
the immigrant community, open to all, ensues and the community’s 
cultural threads are further woven into the greater urban fabric. The 
operative RTTC sub-right here concerns inclusion.



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SMALL-SCALE RETAIL. The city’s produce and 
dry goods street market is thriving thanks to a 
zoning law that keeps rents low on the market 
stalls and protects the market’s contributions to 
affordable and animated city life that is at once 
dense and human-scale. The operative RTTC sub-
right here concerns flourishing.

GARBAGE. The city’s sanitation department 
fails to collect the garbage for two years due 
to inadequate landfill capacity. Quality of life 
declines rapidly as the garbage mounts, hindering 
transportation and circulation of goods and 
services.  After mass demonstrations and public 
pressures, a new landfill location is identified 
for safe disposal, and garbage collection and 
processing are resumed. The operative RTTC sub-
right here concerns entitlement.

Endnotes
1. While the best possible city could be at least more 

good than bad, the optimized good city and the 
best possible city are not necessarily equivalent. 
Beyond the present scope: which is more desirable 
may be a contextual matter, or decidable by 
logical or material considerations.

2. David Harvey argues, from one Marxist 
perspective, that RTTC is a collective right and 
not an individual right; cf. David Harvey, ‘The 
Right to the City, New Left Review 53 (2008), 
23-40.

3. Mark Purcell sees citizens’ claim on RTTC 

as grounded in their contribution to urban 
experience and urban space; if so, the suburban 
claim is strengthened; cf. Mark Purcell, 
‘Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and 
its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant,’ GeoJournal 
58 (2002): 99-108.

4. Margaret Cuonzo sees RTTC in holistic, ecological 
terms—inclusive of the city and all its citizens 
at once; cf. Margaret Cuonzo, ‘The Right to the 
City and the Rights of the City.’ In Deborah 
Mutnick, Margaret Cuonzo, Carole Griffiths, 



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Timothy Leslie, Jay M. Shuttleworth (eds.), The City is an Ecosystem:  
Sustainable Education, Policy, and Practice,  (London: Routledge, 2022), 
105-115.

5. Loren King, ‘Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.’ In Sharon M. 
Meagher, Samantha Noll, and Joseph S. Biehl (eds.), The Routledge 
Handbook of Philosophy of the City, (London: Routledge, 2019), 76-86.

6. Kafui A. Attoh, ‘What Kind of Right is the Right to the City?,’ Progress 
in Human Geography 35 (2011) 5: 669–685; cf. 674.

7. While in Marxist orthodoxy, the city is a material artifact assembled 
by its inhabitants, Lefebvre takes the city as more of an artwork than 
a mundane instrument or tool.  Cf. Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville 
(Paris: Anthropos, 1968), 54-55.

8. Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville, 108, 120-121.
9. Ibid., 120-121; Attoh, ‘What Kind of Right’, 674.
10. Some RTTC advocates focus on a right to cities in particular as opposed 

to rights to generic places (as also include rural, suburban, unsettled 
places, etc.).  I propose that cities’ density and intensity effects—e.g., on 
social, economic, cultural, and communal conditions, information and 
communication facility, and so on—demand our rights-wise attention.  
Density and intensity are core characteristics of cities that (a) brought 
them into being—ostensibly, a net positive, as well as (b) produced 
many pressing problems of urban life.

11. The locus classicus for subsequent Marxist defenses of a Lefebvrian RTTC, 
particularly in a geography tradition, is David Harvey, ‘The Right to the 
City’; cf. also David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to 
the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012). Don Mitchell focuses on 
public space, emphasizing RTTC as a means of contesting privatization 
(cf. Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight 
for Public Space (London: Guilford Press, 2003), esp. 13-41). Other 
authors view the Lefebvrian right in the context of European Marxism 
of his day. Chris Butler stresses the French autogestion tradition (Chris 
Buttler, Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to 
the City (Abingdon, UK: Routledge-Cavendish, 2012), esp. 133-159); 
Daniel Mullis sees a continuity with the Italian operaismo refrain: 
Daniel Mullis,  ‘Prendersi la città’ (‘Recht auf die Stadt. Facetten und 
Möglichkeiten einer Parole,’ Emanzipation, 3 (2013) 2, 57-70). Jean-
Pierre Garnier offers a Marxist dissent, rejecting a Lefebvrian addressing 
ills of capitalist urbanization as prone to serving as “…alibi, wishful 
thinking, or fiction”; cf. Jean-Pierre Garnier, ‘Le droit à la ville de Henri 
Lefebvre à David Harvey. Entre théorisations et realization,’ L’Homme 
& la Société, 1 (2014) 191: 59-70.



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12. Wesley Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions 
as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, Walter Wheeler 
Cook, ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 
1919); for an overview, cf. Leif Wenar, ‘Rights,’ 
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005); 
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights. Attoh 
(‘What Kind of Right’) suggests how the rights 
literature may ground RTTC. 

13. A distinctive model has it that a single right 
with different aspects accommodates the varied 
traditional goals of rights.

14. Defined by, e.g., ethnicity, sub-culture, age, etc.
15. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for 

highlighting the positive right entailed here.
16. See Mitchell, The Right to the City (2003). 

For further notions of public space and rights 
thereto, see Evelyn S. Ruppert, ‘Rights to Public 
Space: Regulatory Reconfigurations of Liberty’, 
Urban Geography, 27 (2006) 3: 271-292; and 
elsewhere in this issue.

17. Even as some worry about a strict determinism, 
empirical evidence mounts for enhanced 
propensities to specific behavioral, cognitive, 
or emotional responses to architectural design; 
cf. Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Welcome to Your 
World: How the Built Environment Shapes Our 
Lives (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 
2017); and Debra Flanders Cushing and 
Evonne Miller, Creating Great Places: Evidence-
based Urban Design for Health and Wellbeing 
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

18. Saul Fisher, ‘Architecture and Philosophy of the 
City.’ In Meagher, Noll, and Biehl, The Routledge 
Handbook of Philosophy of the City, 131-142.

19. See, e.g., Russ Shafer-Landau, ‘Specifying 
Absolute Rights,’ Arizona Law Review 37 (1995): 
209-24; for a rejection of absolute rights; see, 
e.g., Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Realm of Rights 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 
1990).

20. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for noting 



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this issue and suggesting a scale-based articulation of responsibilities.
21. Assigning such responsibilities to architects prompts yet other con-

cerns. Architects are almost never solely responsible for satisfying 
moral claims as attach to even fractional RTTC. Their responsibilities 
may be outweighed by those with greater power to determine the fate 
of cities—or broad, popular rights to them. Further, the temporally 
and demographically diffuse nature of rights holders—the shifting city 
populace over time—make unclear to whom architects might have 
responsibilities, or how the duration of such responsibilities should be 
gauged.  


