David Harvey’s The Right to the City develops Lefebvre’s urban politics into a critique of capitalism, arguing that the city is not simply a place where social life happens, but one of the principal mechanisms through which capital absorbs surplus, reorganises society and reproduces class power. For Harvey, the right to the city is not merely the right to access urban resources; it is the collective right to reshape urbanisation itself, and therefore to reshape the kinds of people, relations and everyday lives that cities produce. His argument begins from the claim that dominant human-rights language is often too individualistic and property-based to challenge neoliberal power. Against this, Harvey insists that urban rights must be collective, because cities are collectively produced and transformed through political struggle. He traces this through historical examples such as Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris and Robert Moses’s remaking of New York, showing how large-scale urban projects absorbed surplus capital while displacing working-class communities and creating new forms of consumption, surveillance and exclusion. The same logic continues globally through speculative real-estate development, mortgage markets, mega-projects, slum clearance and gentrification. Urbanisation thus appears as both economic solution and social violence: it stabilises capitalism by opening profitable spaces for investment, but it also produces dispossession, segregation and what Harvey calls creative destruction. The city becomes fragmented into gated communities, privatised public spaces and marginalised zones where the poor are pushed aside in the name of development. Harvey’s central contribution is to reveal that struggles over housing, public space, infrastructure and displacement are not local side issues but central conflicts over who controls the social surplus. Consequently, the right to the city demands democratic control over urban production and the use of collective wealth. Harvey concludes that any serious anti-capitalist politics must become urban, because the struggle for the city is also the struggle over the future of social life itself.