The consolidation of the term ‘right to the city’ in the city of São Paulo from the 2013 June demonstrations: a hegemonic articulation?

Abstract This article aims to investigate whether the term “right to the city” can be considered as a hegemonic articulation in the city of São Paulo and the analysis is performed using the Political Theory of Discourse (PTD), developed by Laclau and Mouffe, as a theoretical lens. We traced through history the emergence of the term and the groups that relate to the notion it portrays, having June 2013 demonstrations in Brazil as a starting point: an event that destabilized the sense attributed to a previous hegemony, the city of capital. The local government’s response to those demonstrations was the implementation of the Coordinating Body for the Promotion of the Right to the City, with the intention of establishing the term as a nodal point. By analyzing the discourse of the different groups, we conclude that the right to the city is a counter-hegemony that has an antagonistic relationship with the current hegemony. The main contribution of this article is to identify and analyze the different meanings attributed to the term ‘right to the city’ in São Paulo and how the mapped actors discursively interact to propose new practices for production of urban space.