The right to the city is an idea and a slogan that was first proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his 1968 book Le Droit à la ville. Lefebvre summarizes the ideas as a "demand...[for] a transformed and renewed access to urban life". David Harvey described it as follows:
It has been suggested that the phrase has taken on a variety of meanings and Marcelo Lopes de Souza has argued that as the right to the city has become "fashionable these days", "[t]he price of this has often been the trivialisation and corruption of Lefebvre's concept" and called for fidelity to the original radical meaning of the idea.