‘The right to the city’ revisited: Assessing urban rights – The case of Arab Cities in Israel

• The right to the city is highly abstract and lacks a frame for applicability.
• This paper proposes a framework for assessing urban rights.
• This paper applies the framework to assess rights of Palestinian cities in Israel.
• Both Jews and Arabs, are to a large extent denied the right to the city, although unequally.
• Urban rights among Palestinians are dramatically deficient for political reasons.

Based on a critical revision of Lefebvre's right to the city, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for a right to the city that is made up of several rights. The study uses this framework to assess the right to the city held by the Arab minority in Israel. The study indicates that inhabitants of cities in Israel, both Jews and Arabs, are to a large extent denied the right to the city, although unequally. Significantly, this paper reveals that the rights to the cities held by Palestinians in Israel are deficient and incomplete. This problem is a structural and deeply political and ethnic one that could not be solved at the city level. The right to the city has a political agenda that aims to enhance the political conditions of urban life and its inhabitants in the face of the economic processes and the hegemony of the central state. A crucial insight regarding the right to the city regards city–state relationships, suggesting that the right to the city represents a framework that aims to protect the city from state tyranny and technocrats and to provide adequate human shelter with a strong political status. The absence of the right to the city has the potential to intensify conflicts between the inhabitants and the state; conversely, it suggests that a progressive right to the city might mitigate ethnic conflict.