Le droit à la ville, 1968. Reading Lefebvre’s The Right to the city in planning perspective

The present reading of ‘The Right to the City’—one of the most discussed and quoted writings in the field of urban studies—has a limited scope, focusing on two main concepts and issues: ‘city’ and ‘urban planning’, the fundamental objects and fields of research and action of planners. With the aim of extrapolating a ‘planning lesson’ from a classical text, this paper offers a critical discussion of the meaning of the city as a mediation, and therefore an analysis of L.’s idea of an ‘intermediate domain’ to which the city belongs, in between what in Gramscian terms could be called ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. The paper also tries to highlight the implications that this peculiar position of the city may have for urban planning.