Right to the City

Bůžek, Richard; Dzudzek, Iris; Exner, Andreas; Franke, Bettina; Hübl, Susanne; Kamphaus, Lisa; Löwenberg, Jonas; Tsapas, Vasilis; Strüver, Anke

Abstract

How is the right to the city relevant for health for all and how does it already unfold in concrete practices of urban grassroots movements? How do the diverse structures of health inequalities unfold on the urban scale? How do urban movements address these inequalities through collective action and political struggles? This polylogue presents insights from a roundtable discussion with critical urban scholars and health activists on health as right to the city. The discussion took place at the Radical Health Conference 2021 in Berlin. From the perspective of critical urban theory, Anke Strüver from the University of Graz explains the urban roots of health inequalities and their unequal embodiments. Vasilis Tsapas provides an activist account of how (health) inequalities are addressed in the everyday work of the Solidarity Clinic in Thessaloniki, a radical democratic and anti-hierarchical urban health collective. Andreas Exner as an activist scholar stresses the importance of radical democratic collaborations of right-to-the-city movements and grassroots health initiatives for health equality. Bettina Franke and Jonas Löwenberg from the community healthcare center Poliklinik Leipzig highlight the role of interdisciplinary work and the empowerment of local communities in approaching people’s health from the bottom-up. Following this, the Critical Urban Research Group Münster emphasizes the role of urban space as an important scale for collective transformations of structural health inequalities in the sense of health as a right to the city. The session was moderated by Richard Bůžek and organized by Critical Urban Research Group (Iris Dzudzek, Richard Bůžek, Susanne Hübl, Lisa Kamphaus) from the University of Münster.