The Right to the City: Effects of the Concept's Institutionalization in Brazil

Lack of citizens’ control over urban life remains one of the main narratives in expressions of dissatisfaction with governmental and economic systems all over the world. In the 1960s Henri Lefebvre conceptualized the problem as the crisis of the city that appears due to the neglect of the right to the city. This paper presents the first attempt to get empirical estimation of the direct enactment of the right to the city. The research is aimed to estimate the effect of the concept’s institutionalization on citizens’ quality of life in Brazil. In this paper, I use data on 5496 Brazil municipalities to see whether the new political contract of citizenship resulted in the significant increase in the Municipal Human Development Index in the period from 2000 to 2010. Controlling for economic factors, the Ordered Probit Model provides positive and significant results that grow over time. The findings suggest that the institutionalization of the right to the city results in improvement of residents’ quality of life. Based on the results and the theoretical analysis, the next steps of the research are proposed.