Planetary urbanization and the “right against the urbicidal city”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper discusses how critical urban theory can understand spatial justice in the context of a planetary stage of capitalist urbanization. Empirically, it focuses on urban growth, dispossession, and mandatory resettlement of peri-urban populations triggered by coal mining in Tete, Mozambique. It analyzes how resettlement sites inhabited by the dispossessed-by-mining populations are constituted by the growth of the urbicidal city that explodes into space by subsuming natural resources for its continuous growth, as well as results in urbicide – a deliberate erasure of urban infrastructures and social life. In order to address the question of spatial justice within these resettlement sites, the article focuses on the widely used Lefebvrean notion of the “right to the city”. However, modifying the claim, it argues for the “right against the urbicidal city”, demonstrating how this articulation of spatial justice establishes the “true politics of encounter” in a continuous struggle for spatial justice in the unevenly urban(ized) world.