The Right to the City: Visualizing Home, Resistance, and Belonging

Join the Boston University Initiative on Cities for a discussion highlighting work from our upcoming exhibition, Right to the City.

Henri Lefebvre coined the “Right to the City” in 1968 to assert that urban life should be shaped by the people who inhabit it, not just by the wealthy or market forces. Through community-rooted photography, Dominic Moulden documents displacement and everyday acts of sanctuary, revealing how cities are contested and remade. This lunchtime panel brings together artists, organizers, and Boston leaders to discuss why the Right to the City matters today, how visual storytelling builds accountability and power, and what Boston can do to protect housing, public spaces, and community-led forms of ownership.

About the Exhibition (June 9 - August 8, 2026)

Right to the City is an international movement combating the political, cultural, and environmental repercussions of inequitable land and property (re)development. Over the last decade, advocate and photographic ethnographer Dominic Moulden has traversed shorelines, capturing the global resistance against displacement. This traveling exhibition provides a survey of grassroots organizations, scholars, and community members combating the global repercussions of gentrification.

The first site location, Boston University, is anchored by images taken by Moulden in 2023 and hosted by urbanist and scholar-activist Loretta Lees, Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University. Thereafter, the exhibition will travel to London and be hosted in partnership with Queen Mary University of London, where the display will center around images Moulden captured while touring sites with Loretta Lees and working with Dr. Joseph Hoover, Director of TheoryLAB and Reader in Political Theory at Queen Mary University of London.

Curated by academic Ky Vassor, Right to the City serves as a call to action, uplifting ways we can all safeguard the fundamental human right to a healthy place called home.