Theomai ISSN: 1666-2830
[email protected] Red Internacional de Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo Argentina Bond, Patrick The “Right to the City” Limits to Rights Talk and the need for rights to the Commons Theomai, núm. 27-28, 2013, pp. 42-63 Red Internacional de Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo Buenos Aires, Argentina Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=12429901004 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative Theomai 27-28 Año 2013 Theomai 27-28 · Año 2013 Perspectivas diversas sobre la problemática territorial y urbana The “Right to the City” Limits to Rights Talk and the need for rights to the Commons Patrick Bond 1 Introduction: the city as a challenge for scale-politics There is an emerging debate about how and whether to invoke ‘Rights Talk’ – the appeal to a higher juristic source of power than standard state social policy – so as to gain access to greater levels of state services and goods, with the ‘Commons’ posed as the alternative approach. Many strategists of social justice have become more familiar with the Commons idea in recent years, following the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to the late Elinor Ostrom (1990) based on her book Governing the Commons. On the left, there is awareness of the problem of Ostrom’s ‘contradictions and ambivalences’ – because after all she labored as an academic within the conservative discipline of Political Science in one of the world’s most backward sites of intellectual and social solidarity, the United States, where she played a heroic role in contesting neoliberal homo economicus dogma, in which rational actors are merely individually self-interested.