The Right to the City, The New Municipalism and the Feminist Politics of the Commons: Contributions and Challenges from Mexico City, Barcelona and Beyond

As contested spaces, urban settings express the complex dynamics of exploitation, oppression, and emancipation. Building on long-standing struggles, the right to the city and the new municipalist movements have been creating new imaginaries and material realities that foster the commons and confront privatization, gentrification, and exclusion. From Mexico City to Barcelona and beyond, this thesis analyzes the transformative agendas that multi-sectorial and multi-scalar alliances are putting forward as part of pedagogical-political processes of articulation and differentiation. Within a framework that combines the rights in the city, the rights of the city and the right to the city, I propose to conceptualize the right to (transform) the city as a tridimensional narrative-in-practice. Explicit feminist and decolonial lenses help me to identify some of the most salient limitations and potentials of these initiatives, opening up questions and paths for further dialogue and collaboration across academic fields and social action.