A broad gap exists between “God’s eye” transit maps from above that experts draw and how domestic workers map their commutes in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, through a street-level approach. Based on fieldwork conducted in both cities between 2017 and 2018, including interviews, participant observation, and social cartography, this translational article brings domestic workers’ understanding of the city they traverse daily vis-à-vis how experts conceive modern and rational public transportation systems. Delving into the literature on cartography, the Right to the City (RtC), and feminist geography, the study analyzes this gap and finds how it limits an effective RtC for this massive group of female commuters. It further provides public policy recommendations to address the gap and ensure RtC for all.

A global ageing population presents opportunities and challenges to designing urban environments that support ageing in place. The World Health Organization's Global Age-Friendly Cities movement has identified the need to develop communities that optimise health, participation and security in order to enhance quality of life as people age. Ensuring that age-friendly urban environments create the conditions for active ageing requires cities and communities to support older adults’ rights to access and move around the city (‘appropriation’) and for them to be actively involved in the transformation (‘making and remaking’) of the city. These opportunities raise important questions: What are older adults’ everyday experiences in exercising their rights to the city? What are the challenges and opportunities in supporting a rights to the city approach? How can the delivery of age-friendly cities support rights to the city for older adults? This paper aims to respond to these questions by examining the lived experiences of older adults across three cities and nine neighbourhoods in the United Kingdom. Drawing on 104 semi-structured interviews with older adults between the ages of 51 and 94, the discussion centres on the themes of: right to use urban space; respect and visibility; and the right to participate in planning and decision-making. These themes are illustrated as areas in which older adults’ rights to access and shape urban environments need to be addressed, along with recommendations for age-friendly cities that support a rights-based approach.

There has been considerable attention on Brazil’s experience in applying the right to the city, influencing the urban reform movement and subsequent legislation including the 1988 Constitution and the 2001 Statute of the City. While much is known about Brazil’s urban transformations, this article views this trajectory within debates on social citizenship, expanding the focus to show that property is integral to this debate. Through the lens of social citizenship, property rights and insurgency, this article traces Brazil’s right to the city debate through a focus on three issues: (1) the rights dimension of such debates; (2) the role of the social function of property in urban legislation; and (3) the role of insurgent planning evident in urban social movements. While property rights and land rights are often distanced from debates on social citizenship, the Brazil case provides evidence in which the two are clearly intertwined.

The influx of hundreds of thousands of people from Syria to Turkey, especially into major cities such as İstanbul, together with the Turkish government’s policies towards Syrian refugees, has led to various changes in urban spaces. This article has a twofold objective: it examines and discusses the everyday lives of these refugees with regards to the processes and mechanisms of their exclusion and inclusion in İstanbul, while employing a multiscalar analysis of migration in terms of combining nation-state policies of migration, citizenship, space, and the concept of the “right to the city.” Relying upon interviews and participant observation in the Kanarya and Bayramtepe neighborhoods of İstanbul between 2011 and 2015, I outline the ways in which Syrian Kurdish refugees have been actively transforming İstanbul’s peripheries through their interactions with the Kurds who were forcibly displaced from their rural homes in southeastern Turkey in the 1990s.