Shared spaces affects people’s right to the city

Removing

The removal of public seating in Market Square is indicative of a larger trend in the city of Pittsburgh: that we are ashamed and uncaring in the face of an epidemic of homelessness.

The right to the city does not come included with a membership to a luxury condo in East Liberty; it is an inherent and individual liberty to access parts of urban life, granted to all people living in it. First proposed by French sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his essay “

(The Right to the City) in 1968, this right is not simply a fashionable phrase to indicate one’s place of residency; it is an agency of change and a hand in the shaping of a lived environment. It is the radical notion that one living in a city has a common and a collective say in what happens to it, regardless of economic status.

A city’s common spaces define its common experience by offering social experience found nowhere else, and by supporting an anthropological ecology all its own. In a society that champions independence, we must find community in the ways we allow ourselves to engage in coexistence and togetherness. It is in the public spaces that life is shared, and excluding parties from this experience is a disservice to the cultural progression of the city itself.

The rapid gentrification of Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods has pushed people out of homes where they have lived for decades. Development companies give little mind to the structure, identity, wants or needs of a community in favor of a profitable and generically attractive commercial businesses.

The continued removal of public space is a sorrowful and shameful way of sweeping under the rug the people who are most deeply affected by this wave of commercial business. No longer is Pittsburgh a place for the working class, let alone its unhoused population. We have a right to the city. FELICIA COOPER

Friendship