The trajectory of the right to the city in Recife, Brazil: From belonging towards inclusion

In 1967, Henri Lefebvre developed the Right to the City (RTC) as ‘a cry and demand’ for ‘a transformed and renewed right to urban life’. In Brazil, the RTC was institutionalised in the City Statute in 2001. We examine the trajectory of the RTC in Recife, Brazil, through the lens of Alain Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology of inconsistency, which argues that there is a fundamental disjunction between belonging and inclusion. The articulation between belonging and inclusion produces four different arenas of power and categories of being in the city that we develop as a heuristic framework for analysing the trajectory of participation in Recife, where the struggle for the RTC resulted in a system of popular participation. This system operated under the precept that ‘everyone who lives and works here belongs here’, in opposition to urban capital’s drive to include everything and everyone in the market. However, the RTC was captured within a discourse of participation and inclusivity (what we denominate the ‘RTC for All’) becoming an element in a post-political fantasy, resulting in the decay of popular participation. Nevertheless, we argue that the emancipatory and revolutionary potentiality of the RTC, as advocated by Lefebvre, remains powerful as long as the disjuncture between people’s desire for belonging and capital’s drive for inclusion is foregrounded.