Introduction

Over half the world's population lives in cities. The ‘natural’ world is now predominantly urban, as is the global economy. The fate of the planet depends upon the nature of our urban future. Cities are inevitably complex places and spaces, and social (in)justice within them invariably has a spatial dimension. However, spaces and places, social and political action, justice and injustice now also have a third, virtual, dimension, with digital media technologies, smart buildings and smart cities being complemented by new emerging forms of social cognition, literacy (or, maybe, ‘electracy’) and assemblages of trans-local citizenship. Just as the city is a place and a space, the new media ecology means that the city's environment is truly multidimensional, with justice, politics, action and learning transcending both localities and socio-spatial networks. What is increasingly, and clearly, defining the conditions of possibility for social and environmental justice within the city is, as Henri Lefebvre (1996) argued, the need for a transformed and renewed right to urban life.

The ‘right to the city’ is therefore a claim to recognise the urban as a producer and reproducer of social relations of power in the city and the (substantive) rights to, and realities of, participating in it. Rights and urban citizenship, and, to a significant degree, social learning for social sustainability, entail active engagement in the public realm, in genuinely public spaces and places. An obvious challenge to realising this possibility and need is the continuing dominance of neoliberalism, the marketisation of the social and the privatisation of spaces and places within the city, which has helped foster a ruling value syntax that deliberately conflates freedom with ‘market freedom’ and rights with the ‘rights of business’ rather than those of people or communities. The challenge to public education, public libraries, public culture and public spaces and places is clearly evident in the multidimensional and complex environments of the city where social media have become an integral aspect of everyday life, politics, learning, business, public engagement and trans-local citizenship. This contribution interrogates the interpellation of the social and the spatial, the physical and the virtual, with the politics of justice, democracy, learning and sustainability in realising the right to the city.