In Le Droit a la ville (The Right to the City), published in 1968, the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre argued that the city is a collective work made by its inhabitants and that industrial capitalism had stripped them of access to and control over it. He called for a renewed right of all urban dwellers to participate in shaping and using urban space, not merely to be housed in it. The book criticised technocratic planning and the reduction of the city to a machine for production and consumption. It appeared on the eve of the May 1968 upheavals in France.
It introduced the right to the city, one of the most influential concepts in critical urban thought and later in urban social movements and policy. The phrase became a rallying idea for claims to participation, access and justice in the city.