Collaboratively with Senem Zeybekoğlu Sadri, we present a paper entitled: “The Right to Appropriation: Spatial Rights and the Use of Space” in the International Conference on "Re-appropriation of the City". The proceedings of this conference which was held on 09-11 October 2012 in Tirana was published by Tiranë : Botime Afrojdit, (ISBN:978-9928-4053-9-5). The abstract of this paper is below:
ABSTRACT
People use spaces
through their diverse dwelling practices; including their various economic, politic,
social and cultural activities. These practices take place in all kinds of
lived spaces of people, ranging from the most personal space to the ultimate
common spaces. However otherizations of different groups of people, exclusions
of diverse activities and violations of human rights appear in these spaces
too, due to the transformation of the process of formation of spaces into a
production process, on the grounds of the domination of state, capital, and
institutional knowledge over people and their everyday lives. To prevent these
exclusions and guarantee free and equal life for all people in dignity, spatial
rights, which include all the principles that should fulfil, respect, protect
and promote the rights of every human being in the process of formation,
representation and use of spaces should be determined. These principles can be
developed on the basis of the idea of the right to the city which was
introduced by Henri Lefebvre.
Lefebvre argues that,
the right to the city should modify, concretize and make more practical the
rights of the citizens as urban dwellers (citadin) and users of multiple
services. It would affirm, on the one hand, the right of users to make known
their ideas on the space and time of their activities in the urban area; it
would also cover the right to the use of the centre, a privileged place,
instead of being dispersed and stuck into ghettos (for workers, immigrants, the
‘marginal’, the ‘other’ and even for the ‘privileged’). In other words, the
right to the city imagines inhabitants to have two main rights: (1) the right
to participate centrally in the production of urban space; and (2) the right to
appropriate urban space.
This paper aims to
examine bicommunal activites held in Nicosia UN Controlled Buffer Zone as a sample
of right to appropriation, and develop the socio-political conditions and
requirements which are necessary to have this right fulfilled, so that spaces can
embrace diverse dwelling practices of human beings.
KEYWORDS: APPROPRIATION,
THE RIGHT TO THE CITY, SPATIAL RIGHTS, DWELLING, BUFFER ZONE, NICOSIA
