Abstract
The article proposes a legal concept of the right to the city from the legal and sociological perspective. The utopian concept of the right to the city proposed by Henri Lefebvre, associated to Manuel Castells’ works about urban practices of social mobilization, leads to a definition of the concept of a “just and sustainable” city. Following the method of dialectical humanism presented by Roberto Lyra Filho, the legitimacy of law derives dialectically from the process of liberation of the individual, to the extent that he historically and socially affirms new rights in contradiction with established freedoms. Thus, the search for the legal content of the right to the city lies on the struggles of urban social movements which fight for the recognition of their rights in each historical stage. The right to a just city is conceived, at the current historical moment, as the political right to interfere on decisions about the use of territory and to participate in the production of urban space in the capitalist system of production.
Right to the city; dialectical humanism; Roberto Lyra Filho; urban social movements; utopia