Social Movements & Grassroots Activism -
Linking the Right to the city to the Right to Nature

From gold mining and fracking, large-scale infrastructure projects and land grabbing, to the loss of public green spaces and urban regeneration projects, the intensification of the economic exploitation of land, space and non-human nature both inside and outside the city with the goal to overcome economic recession and boost economic growth has been an integral part of the post-2008 era.

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These reforms took place within a broader context of austerity policies causing increasing social, spatial and environmental inequality confirming that austerity is a class policy that leads to the social restructuring of society and the appropriation of the commons by specific sections of capital and powerful elites.

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This was accompanied by a more revanchist phase of neoliberal urban development which became apparent, inter alia, in the neoliberal restructuring of cities, which often took the form of urban austerity policies and authoritarian neoliberal urbanism with huge and unequal consequences for city dwellers across lines of gender, race and class.

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The concept of the "Right to Nature" has been coined by our long-term research on the relationships between society, nature and space (Apostolopoulou and Adams, 2019; Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez, 2019; Apostolopoulou, 2019, 2020; Cortes-Vazquez and Apostolopoulou, 2019), to signal the need for a radically different understanding of social and environmental struggles as deeply intertwined, emphasise the need for collective action to achieve social, spatial and environmental justice and highlight the need to co-create alternative ways of organising social production and reproduction.

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The right to nature is part of ongoing struggles for the "Right to the City" (Lefebvre, 1968, 1996; Harvey, 2008, 2012; Purcell, 2002), first raised by Lefebvre in 1968 to support the need for a different production of urban public space in order to oppose its privatisation and commercialisation and related social inequality.

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The right to the city and the right to nature are fundamental social rights and their connection highlights the need to organise social struggles both around the workplace and the living conditions of the working class, immigrants, and marginalised social groups in order to remake the geographies of everyday life, eradicate poverty, environmental degradation and social, spatial and ecological inequality within and beyond cities.