The right to the city and its limits

Abstract

This chapter scrutinises the limits of the celebrated 'Right to the City' (RttC) concept by way of a vigorously contested compulsory purchase order (CPO) on the site of the athletes' Games Village for Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014. For D. Harvey, one of H. Lefebvre's chief supporters, the RttC term has too often become an 'empty signifier' or mere 'chimera' due to the abstraction of its terms, an opacity which has often left cognate urban literature and practice theoretically and politically underdeveloped. The chapter explores a property conflict ignited by the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and its related urban renewal projects, in which the state used a Compulsory Purchase Order, a kind of emergency measure for property, to evict one family. The only grounds on which contestation could be made was the suitability of the site for the proposed development and the necessity of compulsory purchase orders for acquiring the properties.

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