The Right to Appropriation

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