Introduction

The localisation of human rights is a relatively new trend which emerged in the late 1990s at the initiative of several stakeholders. This new narrative took shape through different concepts: human rights in the city, human rights cities and the right to the city. In Europe, the process started at the initiative of local authorities and crystallised through the idea of ‘human rights in the city’, basically advocating for the role of municipalities in human rights implementation through local policies. At the global level, the ‘human rights cities’ movement was founded by an international organisation, the Peoples’ Movement for Human Rights Learning (PDHRE), aimed at fostering empowerment and social transformation through human rights education. Human Rights Cities according to the PDHRE's roadmap are usually the result of community-based organisations’ initiative, although in some cases the municipal government has taken the leading role.Footnote ¹ Finally, in the Global South the fight for urban justice was translated into the concept of the ‘right to the city’, a political flag spearheaded by civil society and urban social movements advocating for the social function of the city.

Although these three concepts emerged through different processes and were coined by different stakeholders, they are sometimes used indistinctly or even as synonymous. Several contributors refer to the notion of a ‘human rights city’ (see Van den Berg, Buerger or Neubeck in this volume). This chapter will add some complexity to the topic by exploring the concepts ‘human rights in the city’ and the ‘right to the city’, with the particular purpose of determining how they contribute to renegotiating citizenship.

Renegotiating rights in the urban space

As argued in the introduction of this book, one of the aspects of the promise held by the localisation of human rights is that it may contribute to the renegotiation of rights in the urban space. In other words, the realisation of human rights in cities may result in processes of which Holston calls ‘insurgent citizenship’ (Holston Reference Holston and Sandercock1998). Cities are intrinsically dynamic and, as this American anthropologist shows, the social relations developed in them challenge modernity's political project and its definition of citizenship. According to the tradition of legal positivism, the state is the only legitimate source of citizenship rights. But in reality citizenship is not only defined de jure by the state, but also de facto by the interaction of urban agents. These processes of renegotiation of citizenship are insurgent because they confront the established social contract, be it to expand it or to erode it. Expansion occurs when marginalised citizens or non-citizens contest their exclusions and manage to broaden the array of rights effectively available to them. It implies widening substantive citizenship by ‘creating new kinds of rights, based on the exigencies of lived experience, outside the normative and institutional definitions of state and its codes (Holston Reference Holston and Sandercock1998: 52). Erosion takes place through segregation, privatisation, ghettoisation or fortification of the city, subverting the status of formal citizenship proclaimed by the state (Holston Reference Holston and Sandercock1998: 48–53). Renegotiating rights in the urban scene has thus to do with this twofold movement of expansion and erosion.

This chapter pays particular attention to the expanding dimension of ‘insurgent citizenship’ by exploring how the ‘human rights in the city’ and ‘right to the city’ narrative may contribute to enlarge the range of rights effectively granted to excluded urban dwellers. The challenge here will be to valorise the life experiences and knowledge claimed by subaltern groups which have been marginalised by the modernist project. This is what Santos coined as the ‘epistemologies of the South’ (Santos Reference Santos2014), a theoretical tool which confronts the hegemonic rationality established by modernity, arguing that it has privileged a partial view of reality while silencing certain groups, practices and suffering caused by three converging processes: capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. Here, the South is not a geographic parameter, but a metaphor of human suffering. Against this background, the ‘epistemologies of the South’ aim at removing the so-called ‘abyssal line’, which is constitutive of Western-based social and cultural relations and divides individuals between those who are acknowledged and protected by the system and those who are excluded from it.

Taking the ‘epistemologies of the South’ as our cognitive and political horizon, this chapter will outline the origin and operationalisation of the narratives of ‘human rights in the city’ and the ‘right to the city’ with the purpose of exploring their impact in terms of social emancipation and expansion of citizenship.

Human rights in the city

The right to the city

Not just a play on words: political implications of both approaches

As we have seen, the most popular concept both in Europe and in what we could call ‘developed countries’ (Canada or South Korea) is that of ‘human rights in the city’. This narrative contributed to acknowledging the role of local government in human rights implementation, traditionally attributed to central government. This shift can potentially result in a better realisation of economic, social and cultural rights, especially regarding the provision of municipal public services. Likewise, it can enhance the materialisation of political rights through participatory democracy.

This narrative also innovates the human rights discourse by adding the so-called ‘proximity-based rights’ to the classic human rights understanding. This new set of rights is related to urban issues and local governance, such as public transportation, sustainable and healthy urbanisation, international municipal cooperation, local administration of justice, local accountability and citizen participation, among others.

Notwithstanding these important contributions to the human rights discourse, two main elements have to be noted. First, the ‘human rights in the city’ narrative generally sticks to the hegemonic understanding of human rights in the sense that it gives pre-eminence to an individual conception of rights and to the idea that institutions (in this case, local administrations) grant rights to individuals. Despite the importance given to citizen participation in local governance, here the role of citizens is basically related to the conception, implementation and monitoring of local policies aiming at realising already recognised human rights, rather than redefining them. In other words, the leading role belongs to local administrations, while society has a complementary – though necessary – role. Such top-down processes rarely give room to the valorisation of other type of knowledges based on the life experiences of marginalised groups and thus are less permeable to ‘insurgent citizenshipʼ practices. Second, this narrative has generally fallen into programmatic declarations rather than into long-lasting policy-making dynamics, even in cities which have explicitly endorsed a municipal human rights charter, as the example of the Province of Barcelona shows.

In contrast to this trend, the ‘right to the city’ narrative has been spearheaded by civil society and social movements in the Global South. These stakeholders conceive the right to the city as a complex right containing two dimensions: first, the acknowledgement of classic human rights (civil, political, economic, social and cultural) conceived as strongly interdependent and indivisible; and second, a claim for the social function of the city and its democratic management. This second dimension entails confronting the current urban development model which very often results in the commodification of urban land, the privatisation of public spaces, gentrification processes and an urban planning model favouring economic interests. In opposition to this, the second dimension of the right to the city gives voice to those groups of people which have been marginalised by the hegemonic model of urban development and evidences the collision of interests existing in cities between ruling elites and subaltern groups. The latter are usually invisible to classic human rights, which do not take into account the spatial dimension of urban problems, affecting today most of half of the world population today. In contrast, the right to the city provides an urban-based approach to human rights by advocating for public spaces, proximity-based municipal services, mixed districts, decentralised opportunities for decent jobs, spaces that stimulate sociability and cultural expressions, or the valorisation of the multiple identities coexisting in the urban milieu, among others.

In short, from the right to the city viewpoint, the city is a battlefield rather than a mere delimited territory where human rights will be easily realised, as it might underlie in the ‘human rights in the city’ discourse. In this regard, it is a tool with significant political potential, as the Latin American cases show. In this region, bottom-up struggles used the right to the city as a political flag and managed to influence institutional politics by expanding the existing social contract through a new constitutional and legal framework. Of course, the challenge is ensuring the translation of this new framework into effective policies. The renegotiation of rights is not a process that ends when the law acknowledges a specific struggle. It continues after that through constant social vigilance. Still, when the experience of urban dwellers living at the margins of the city and invisible to the system is partly recognised, another epistemic paradigm, the ‘epistemologies of the South’, gains ground.

Introduction

Slowly the crowd snakes its way along Corporation Street in central Manchester. Around 200 people walk in a long, slightly unruly line, carrying banners, placards and a few pairs of drums. In the midst of this procession I walk slowly, following a mother with a young child in a pushchair and alongside a middle-aged couple together holding a sign that reads ‘Dignity not Destitution’ in thick black letters. The crowd comprises a mix of ages, ethnicities and immigration statuses, activists, volunteers, congregations, asylum seekers, refugees, students. The procession is led by a man with a megaphone who shouts as we walk. ‘Dignity not destitution, human rights not persecution’, he proclaims and anticipates our mass repetition of this phrase. ‘A right to life and a right to rights’, he shouts to the rhythm of a drum. ‘We are all human beings’, he asserts, placing emphasis on the word ‘all’ and encouraging the crowd to respond with greater volume as we walk. As the procession makes its way towards the town hall, we pass the end of Market Street, and shoppers walking between outlets on a Saturday lunchtime pause to see where the sound is coming from. I see a few bewildered faces as we walk past. As the shoppers return to their task we walk on, carving a noisy path through the congestion of an urban Saturday.

The account provided above describes my involvement with a national ‘day of action’ in support of asylum seekers across the United Kingdom that took place in June 2013. This day of action saw speeches, music, food, poetry and marches through the centre of a number of British cities, including Manchester. The ‘day of action’ called on local authorities to publically oppose government policy on asylum support and was focused on the rights of asylum seekers made destitute by government policy. In this chapter, I want to ask how we might account for and understand this use of human rights through the city. In doing so, I argue that campaigns and events such as this fall between the formal notion of the human rights city and the radical challenges posed through a ‘right to the city’ agenda (see also García Chueca and Sánchez Rodríguez in this volume). Rather, they call for a broader theorisation of the value of the city to human rights claims and social justice, an account of the urbanisation of human rights. It is to the task of sketching such an account that I direct this chapter.

As with many other national contexts, within the UK human rights are often discussed and framed as foreign or distant concerns, liberties to be protected and promoted ‘abroad’ rather than ‘at home’ (Nash Reference Nash2012). This presumption of human rights within the United Kingdom is simultaneously challenged through a national rhetoric on the centre right of British politics which associates human rights with European interventionism, political correctness and the gradual waning of state sovereignty (Brown Reference Brown2004). Domestic human rights are therefore neither particularly popular, nor particularly well supported within British political life (Webber Reference Webber2012). Despite a number of high profile exceptions (see Graham et al. in this volume), in the UK human rights are often cast as an assumed legal norm which does not warrant further discussion, or as a dangerous and prohibitive limit on the rights of governments to deport ‘aliens’ and manage and control populations (see Darling Reference Darling2014; Huysmans and Buonfino Reference Huysmans and Buonfino2008). Despite this, however, many social movements and organisations still draw explicitly on a language of human rights in making claims to the British state. One key area of such claims making is that of citizenship and the rights of non-citizens. In this chapter, through the work of the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign, I shall illustrate some of the challenges that are posed by utilising such a language in a context that can appear indifferent, if not at times hostile, to human rights.

Despite the suspicion of human rights discourses that at times marks the UK context, Nash (Reference Nash2009: 1081) argues that ‘human rights are being used by organisations to frame and contest inequalities in the treatment of citizens and non-citizens’. From rights to shelter and support, through to voting rights and political participation, human rights have been utilised as means of highlighting and contesting the problematic nature of distinctions between the citizen and the non-citizen in a range of international contexts (Benhabib Reference Benhabib2004; Chimienti and Solomos Reference Chimienti and Solomos2011; Morris Reference Morris2012; Schuster and Solomos Reference Schuster and Solomos2002; Shafir and Brysk Reference Shafir and Brysk2006). However, as Nash (Reference Nash2009) concludes, such human rights advocacy has not yet produced any form of universal citizenship modelled around human rights principles. Rather, its impact might instead be seen as making the ‘distinction between citizens and non-citizens’ more complex through the multiplication of citizen and non-citizen statuses, gradations and conditional rights (Morris Reference Morris2009, Reference Morris2010; Nash Reference Nash2009; Zetter Reference Zetter2007). The impact of a turn to human rights as a political and legal framing through which to question dominant regimes of citizenship, is for Nash (Reference Nash2012: 808) one of producing a ‘patchwork of legal victories, compromises, temporary solutions, and political trade-offs’, as law becomes both ‘a resource and a constraint’ for social movements and campaigns (Cook Reference Cook2011: 565; see also Morris Reference Morris2010).

Whilst I agree with Nash's evocation of a patchwork of political and legal contingencies and compromises marking the terrain on which claims to and for citizenship are fought, I want to suggest that we must also be mindful of the locations through which frames of human rights move. Focusing on the city enables us to see how contentious claims to rights are mobilised through particular sites to shape social change. The relation between the city as a site of connections, and human rights principles as a common language of claims-making, illustrates the potential that urban articulations of human rights may have to shape policy discussions and legal practice.

In making this case, the chapter develops as follows. I begin by outlining the nature of discussions over human rights cities, whilst referring back to the concept of the right to the city (see also Frate and García Chueca in this volume). To consider these ideas in practice, I return to the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign as a means to show how a language of human rights was mobilised in working with destitute asylum seekers. From looking at this campaign, I suggest that the value of the city as a location for human rights may be in its ability to fuse together conditions of proximate diversity and relational connections, such that an interaction between human rights inspired claims and urban forms of solidarity can be forged. The value of human rights in this context is in mobilising a language and a vision bigger than the urban scale, a means to draw in and mobilise different interest groups behind pluralist projects of social justice (see Connolly Reference Connolly2005). To fully encompass such potential, I conclude by arguing that the notion of a ‘human rights city’ needs to be situated within a broader account of the urbanisation of human rights. I begin with considering how a concern with human rights may be situated alongside discussions of the right to the city.

Human rights cities and the right to the city

Cities have long been seen as key sites of political dissent, argument and contestation. Indeed as Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans (Reference Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans2012: 2546) assert, cities might even be thought of as ‘constitutive of social movements’, as their defining features of ‘density, size, and diversity’ provide ‘the basic elements for contention to develop’. Yet it is only recently that such contention has been explicitly linked to a human rights agenda. Whilst human rights activism has a long history, a focus upon specifically urban modes of authority is relatively new, reflecting a series of shifts in the territorialisation of authority and governance (see Oomen in this volume; Sassen Reference Sassen2006). As nation-states are increasingly challenged as singular sites of political power and legislative governance, cities are argued to offer alternative means of global governance, coordination and networking (Barber Reference Barber2013; Magnusson Reference Magnusson2012). It is within this context, that Oomen (in this volume) argues that local and municipal authorities are becoming key actors in human rights implementation, as they provide means to coordinate and connect urban policies, audiences and authorities in the pursuit of human rights agendas.

In such discussions, human rights cities are taken to represent cities which seek to ‘explicitly base their urban policies on international human rights’ (Oomen in this volume), and in doing so utilise human rights frameworks, approaches and legislation in order to achieve particular goals, through ‘connecting the local to the global’ as Grigolo (Reference Grigolo2010: 896) puts it. The importance of the city in this connection is precisely in its ability to ground human rights in specific contexts, to offer a proximity to those individuals and groups who are most affected by the violation of human rights principles and laws (Grigolo Reference Grigolo2011b). At the same time, as Oomen (in this volume) asserts, such a localisation may serve to counter the ‘critiques of imperialism’ often aimed at the language of human rights through reflecting the challenges of bringing human rights ‘in line with local practices, cultures and beliefs’.

The rising prominence of human rights cities in Europe and North America, might therefore be seen to coincide, in part, with an increased focus on the transnational networking of cities as political actors and as cultural and economic brands above and beyond the boundaries of the nation-state (see Oomen in this volume; Sassen Reference Sassen2006). At same time, cities are argued to have become central to the ‘roll out’ of neoliberal forms of governance, marketisation and entrepreneurialism, such that services and responsibilities formerly held by the state are increasingly ‘devolved’ to urban centres (Brenner and Theodore Reference Brenner and Theodore2002; Fuller and Geddes Reference Fuller and Geddes2008; Harvey Reference Harvey1989). Whilst the effects of such state re-structuring are complex and multiple (see Brenner Reference Brenner2004), it is worth noting two of these emergent conditions. Firstly, following the ‘hollowing out’ of many state welfare services, the transfer of responsibility for social reproduction and survival to the level of the individual has produced an increasingly uneven geography of access to welfare, infrastructure and education (Cloke, May and Johnsen Reference Cloke, May and Johnsen2010; Whiteford Reference Whiteford2010). As a result, cities have been argued to represent fragmented landscapes of provision and privilege, where the inequalities of neoliberal governance are seen to deny access to public space and public infrastructure on the basis of wealth and normative assumptions of social ‘worth’ (Graham and Marvin Reference Graham and Marvin2001; MacLeod Reference MacLeod2002; MacLeod and Ward Reference MacLeod2002). Secondly, in response to the variegated exclusions of neoliberal urbanism, new modes of ‘insurgent’ urban citizenship have been articulated by social movements that contest the inequality and dispossession of the neoliberal city (Holston Reference Holston2009; Uitermark and Nicholls Reference Uitermark and Nicholls2014). In part, it is these diverse struggles against urban exclusion that have popularised a return to Lefebvre's evocative discussion of ‘the right to the city’ as a critical orientation point for urban social movements (Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1996; Mayer Reference Mayer2009). Importantly though, it is within this context of state restructuring and the growing prominence of the city as a central actor in formulating and implementing social policies, that the emergence of human rights cities is situated. Indeed, as Oomen (in this volume) argues, a central argument behind such moves has been one of the need to explore the ‘potential of cities to deliver where nation states have failed’ on rights, social justice and equality.

With such potential in mind, I want to consider how the concept of the human rights city may be positioned in relation to urban social movements framed around Lefebvre's (Reference Lefebvre1996) notion of the right to the city. For some, the right to the city stands for a form of participatory and consultative governance, whereby urban inhabitants have the right to politically engage in shaping the city through processes of claims-making, discussion and ‘active’ participatory citizenship (see Plyushteva Reference Plyushteva2009; Purcell Reference Purcell2006). In linking this philosophical orientation to the emergence of human rights cities, Oomen (in this volume) argues that whilst the employment of human rights as a means to bring about social change is an essential component of the human rights city, so too is the process of mobilising and enrolling diverse urban stakeholders in the project of social change. A concern with the participation of inhabitants within a city, of engaging and enrolling those present as a means of working towards a socially just city, is therefore key in explaining how and why the language and practice of human rights has greater resonance in some cities than others.

A second connection between these bodies of work, arises in the employment of a language of rights to connect diverse struggles. As Attoh (Reference Attoh2011) suggests, the right to the city is often discussed in vague terms, with some arguing that it is this conceptual openness that enables the term to resonate with different political agendas (Mitchell and Heynan Reference Mitchell and Heynen2009). Similarly, Oomen and Baumgärtel (Reference Oomen2014: 726) argue that in practice, ‘[r]eference to human rights can form a common language, rallying different people, activities and interests and strengthening social cohesion within the city’. In this context, a language of human rights may serve to articulate common causes and highlight the political tensions between enacting rights within the city and claiming rights at the level of the nation-state. Here the ‘indeterminacy’ and ‘unfixity’ in ‘both the content and boundary of rights’ that Morris (Reference Morris2012: 43) and Soysal (Reference Soysal2012) relate to the contested actualisation of universal human rights, suggests that human rights may act as sites of struggle which possess the ‘ability to re-imagine social boundaries’ (Morris Reference Morris2012: 44). However, the complexity of such a response is highlighted by Grigolo's (Reference Grigolo2010: 908–909) reminder that urban authorities are rarely actors with ‘a unified human rights agenda’. In reality, different interests within any city ‘may have different and sometimes conflicting ideological orientations, knowledge and commitments in relation to human rights’ (Ibid.: 909; Oomen in this volume). This means that we should be wary of too easily romanticising or uncritically celebrating the city as a site for social justice (see Purcell Reference Purcell2006), just as we should be wary of uncritically assuming that rights represent progressive or egalitarian values detached from state authority and influence (see Morris Reference Morris2009, Reference Morris2010).

There is also a need for caution in too readily appropriating Lefebvre's (Reference Lefebvre1996) call for the right to the city as an orientation point for human rights in any conventional sense (see García Chueca in this volume). Indeed, a number of writers have argued that in doing so the radical agenda to which Lefebvre attached such a right has been mislaid (see for example, Mayer Reference Mayer2009; Purcell Reference Purcell2003; Sánchez Rodríguez in this volume). Purcell (Reference Purcell2003), for example, argues that the right to the city can only ever be enacted through a radical reworking of economic, social and political relations, such that cities and their inhabitants take responsibility for the impacts and implications of their decision-making. This radical strand is less clearly present in a concern with human rights cities and this might be accounted for in considering how the right to the city engages with notions of citizenship. Here Isin (2001: 14–15, cited in Dikeç and Gilbert Reference Dikeç and Gilbert2002: 70), argues that ‘Lefebvre saw the rights to the city as an expression of urban citizenship, understood not as a membership in a polity – let alone the nation-state – but as a practice of articulating, claiming and renewing group rights in and through the appropriation and creation of spaces in the city’, whilst Lefebvre (Reference Lefebvre2014: 205) himself proposed that the ‘right to the city implies nothing less than a revolutionary concept of citizenship’. If the right to the city confers a form of revolutionary and radical citizenship, one not tied to membership to a polity but to the practice of shaping urban space, then we might ask if such a right resonates with the practice of human rights at the urban level?

Initially, it would seem that there is scope for a degree of convergence. For example, Harvey (Reference Harvey2008: 23) writes that the right to the city may mean a ‘right to change ourselves by changing the city…The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is…one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’. Yet at the same time, it is the nature of this change that undermines such a straightforward connection. Lefebvre's right to the city is not a right to be inserted into the city, but rather it is a right to change that comes from within the city, from within its inhabitants and the connections they forge in the process of making and remaking urban space. Dikeç and Gilbert (Reference Dikeç and Gilbert2002: 71) thus argue that for Lefebvre rights were ‘at once ethical and political projects. They were not rights to be distributed from above, but rather, rights to be defined and redefined through political struggle and social relations’. The right to the city as a mode of citizenship is thus essentially about practice, about enacting rights as part of a political project of transforming the city. Such a transformative aspect may be lost when such a right is institutionalised and codified too rigidly as ‘institutionalised sets of rights boil down to claims for inclusion in the current system as it exists’ they do not ‘aim at transforming the existing system – and in that process ourselves’ (Mayer Reference Mayer2009: 369). It is this transformative drive which places the relation between the right to the city and human rights in question, asking as it does how readily a concern with human rights aims to transform the city beyond including excluded groups within it.

It is here that a further critical question for discussions of human rights cities arises, that of the extent to which they may be seen to embody a condition of ‘moral urbanism’ (Darling Reference Darling2013). Tied to the increasingly entrepreneurial nature of urban governance and the comparative politics of global urban league tables and metrics (see McCann Reference McCann2004), ‘moral urbanism’ denotes attempts to position a city as representing a set of moral values or virtues without necessarily embedding those values in policy or practice. Moral urbanism might thus represent a potential motivating factor behind becoming a human rights city. For, as Oomen (in this volume) asserts, in a context of urban entrepreneurialism reference to rights may open ‘avenues towards international networks, sources of funding and expertise’ and may enhance city-marketing through articulating ‘cosmopolitan’ urban identities. Thus whilst cities make a conscious decision to frame their concerns with reference to rights, the language of right is often ‘sold’ as ‘a clever obligation’ that brings with it certain opportunities for reputational, social and economic capital (see Accardo, Grimheden and Starl Reference Accardo, Grimheden, Starl, Benedek, Benoît-Rohmer, Karl and Nowak2012). At the same time, however, the reputational politics of comparison that a concern with moral urbanism articulates might also be effective in working towards the progressive implementation of human rights norms and forms of social justice. Thus where put into practice, the enforcement of human rights through the city may force comparison and replication between cities in a more positive sense (see Davis in this volume), as cities compete over not merely the language of rights, but their practical implementation too.

Examining the possible connections and fault lines between the practice of urban human rights and theories of the right to the city thus illustrates the conceptual challenges of accounting for human rights in an urban context. Practically, however, I argue that both of these approaches, whilst valuable, may serve to overlook the relationships between human rights and cities being produced in campaigns that fall someway below the formal codification of the human rights city and someway short of the radical transformation envisaged by Lefebvre's (Reference Lefebvre2014: 205) ‘revolutionary concept of citizenship’. To valorise these relations that fall between radical theory and legal practice, I want to examine the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign and consider how this campaign developed an interplay between a language of human rights and the conditions of the city as a political actor.

‘Dignity Not Destitution’

The ‘Dignity Not Destitution’ campaign seeks to challenge existing government policy on the support of asylum seekers within the United Kingdom (Bloch and Schuster Reference Bloch and Schuster2002; Squire Reference Squire2009). It emerges from a context of increasingly repressive and restrictive public policy on asylum in the United Kingdom (Bloch and Schuster Reference Bloch and Schuster2005; Darling Reference Darling2009). Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the United Kingdom have been dispersed to accommodations across the country on a ‘no choice’ basis whilst awaiting decisions on their claims for refugee status. This policy has meant that a large number of towns and cities have been faced with accommodating small but visible populations of asylum seekers in an effort to reduce a perceived ‘burden’ on London (Robinson, Andersson and Musterd Reference Robinson, Andersson and Musterd2003). Alongside the imposed accommodation of the dispersal system, asylum seekers have, since 2004, been denied the right to work whilst awaiting status and are provided with a weekly cash support capped significantly below other forms of social welfare. The ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign calls on the government to change the policy of withdrawing asylum support after decisions on status have been taken, regardless of whether or not an individual can be returned to their country of origin. As some countries do not have deportation agreements with the UK, and therefore refuse to accept returnees, this places refused asylum seekers from these countries in a legal limbo between the official refusal of status in the United Kingdom and an inability to return to the country they have fled. In such cases, refused asylum seekers are forced to rely upon charities and friends for survival. Associated with such exclusion have been claims, most notably by The Joint Committee on Human Rights in 2007, that successive governments have used destitution as a tool to encourage voluntary returns by refused asylum seekers (see Amnesty International 2006; JCHR 2007). Destitution is thus argued to be less an accidental or procedural gap within the asylum system and more an intentional and insecure position imposed on those no longer wanted by the state (Cunningham and Cunningham Reference Cunningham and Cunningham2007; Darling Reference Darling2009).

In opposing the use of destitution in this way, the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign mobilises human rights norms to argue that asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute should be provided with sufficient support so that they can meet their essential living needs and be given permission to work if their case hasn't been resolved within six months. Traditional political structures of lobbying, awareness raising and social media have been utilised to communicate a message that destitution is a state-sanctioned violation of human rights. Yet, what is interesting about this campaign is the manner in which it has articulated such a message through dispersal cities.

The campaign was started in 2009 in Bristol and Glasgow by a mixture of asylum advocates, support groups and asylum seekers, who together attempted to gain local political support for the opposition of government policy on destitution. Following this example, the model of focusing on urban authorities was transferred to a series of other dispersal locations as local activists, social movements and support networks became aware of the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign and sought to support it in their cities. Part of the significance of this localisation is that the very system of asylum dispersal in the United Kingdom may create the conditions through which human rights claims might be made through cities. Oomen (in this volume) links the rise of human rights concerns within cities to practices of decentralisation through which social services and support are increasingly the responsibility of urban authorities, alongside an increase in the diversity of demands placed on cities. With the dispersal of asylum seekers across the United Kingdom, the diversity of those demands in different cities has increased. Dispersal has impacted cities with a relatively long history of multiculturalism, migration and diversity, such as Birmingham and Liverpool, and those cities with much less experience of negotiating the demands of diversity, such as Middlesbrough and Newcastle. In each of these cases the arrival of dispersed asylum seekers has produced both demands on the local authority, for employment and accommodation services, and on local communities and charities, for social support, friendship and conviviality. It is within this context that a concern with human rights may emerge, as both cities and their citizens become aware of the demands that dispersal poses and the exclusions that asylum policy produces. If, as Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans (Reference Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans2012) argue, cities provide the incubators for contention, then it is worth considering whether dispersal itself acts to plant the seeds of such contention.

With contention in mind, the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign focused on encouraging urban authorities to take an explicit stance in opposition to government policy on issues of asylum policy and destitution. The campaign itself drew together an array of different actors, from a series of supporting advocacy organisations such as Amnesty International and Regional Asylum Activism, to churches, charities, trade unions and dispersed asylum seekers and refugees. The campaign not only evoked human rights claims for equality and justice via demands for basic living needs, but addressed these demands to national government through the city as a conduit for advancing a human rights agenda. Through public demonstrations, lobbying of councillors, public petitions, and encouraging the public to send postcards to their elected representatives demanding ‘Dignity not Destitution’ for asylum seekers, the campaign in Manchester and elsewhere was intended as a means to encourage urban authorities to pass motions of opposition to government policy. In making this case, the supporting organisation Regional Asylum Activism argues that:

The ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign thus aimed at localising a concern with the rights of destitute asylum seekers to the level of individual dispersal cities. Part of the argument being put to local authorities was centred around the practicalities of resource allocation, suggesting that the ‘burden of providing support’ for the destitute falls on local authorities who have ‘little control over the asylum decision making process’ (Ibid.). In calling for local authorities to publically back the right to asylum support, the campaign argued that destitution was ‘a crisis that Central Government should resolve, rather than leaving it to local authorities and communities to respond’ (Ibid.).

Yet, the work of this campaign was not solely focused on lobbying local authorities directly. Rather, as my opening account of the Manchester march suggests, significant effort was employed to engage with the wider public and to raise awareness of destitute asylum seekers in dispersal cities. It was here that the language of human rights and universalising concepts such as ‘dignity’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ were mobilised in an effort to gain public support for the needs of the destitute. The day of action and its noise and slogans proved one means of doing this, as did the distribution of flyers across the city and the production of postcards explaining the situations of destitute asylum seekers and asking residents to post these to their local Councillor, calling on them to support the campaign. These postcards and flyers sought to foreground the human rights implications of government policy and argued that using destitution as a tool of deterrence was a breach of international human rights principles.

To date, the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign has had a number of successes. Municipal authorities in Bradford, Bristol, Coventry, Glasgow, Kirklees, Leicester, Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford, Sheffield and Swansea have all debated and passed motions to oppose asylum destitution and to call for changes in asylum policy from the Home Office. Manchester joined this list in March 2014 and as a result, the City Council has written to the Home Secretary to call for a far more comprehensive support system for asylum seekers and for the right to work for those in the country for longer than six months. The challenge beyond these local motions of support and opposition is clearly to effect an impact on central government policy. Given the constraints on municipal power within the United Kingdom, and the wholly centralised nature of asylum and immigration policy within Westminster, it is difficult to see how anything like a ‘human rights city’ that directs and embeds human rights issues within local policy can be enacted around asylum. However, the importance of local authorities supporting such a cause should also not be underestimated. Indeed, one of the key aims of this form of political mobilisation was to utilise multiple urban publics in order to push for change in the longer term. Thus as Paul,Footnote ¹ an asylum activist from London, argued:

In the case of the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign then, cities were viewed as sites in which the meaning of human rights was interpreted, employed and contested in practice. This may thus reflect a wider understanding of the human rights city, as expressed in a number of contributions to this volume (see Frate and Kamuf Ward in this volume). Human rights principles were employed in order to raise awareness of destitution, to pose questions over who has rights within the city and the extent to which those rights are limited, constrained and conditional. If nothing else, in this case, human rights and the call that ‘we are all human beings’, seeks to pose questions over the forms of public policy seen as permissible when applied to asylum seekers, as Regional Asylum Activism illustrate.

Human rights in practice and the perils of ‘moral urbanism’

By considering the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign, I would argue that we can see some of the possibilities and the tensions of adopting a human rights approach in the politics of urban asylum. In the case of the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign, human rights ideals were employed as a means of connecting different arguments and audiences. For example, arguments made to elected officials about the economic benefits to be gained from enabling asylum seekers to work were strengthened when placed alongside human rights principles that emphasise an adequate standard of living and the right to work as important social rights. Similarly, arguments made to the public over extremes of exclusion faced by destitute asylum seekers, were advanced through reference to the right to seek refuge, rights to shelter and to essential living needs. Whilst the issue of support for asylum seekers is a notoriously complex one, drawing on a language of human rights and demands for the basics of human life, provided one means of garnering public and political support.

The second point of value arises from a concern with the city as a site of contention and connection. The ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign was a campaign focused on opening up the possibility of different conversations over destitution as a result of changing attitudes at an urban level. In a way this reflects the very nature of the asylum debate in the United Kingdom, one often encountered and lived in cities but directed, controlled and ordered by central government. The ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign does not make demands on policy at this urban level, beyond calling for change at the national level which may have the impact of enhancing human rights more broadly. Whilst such demands may fall short of the radical reworking of citizenship called for through the right to the city, they may also avoid some of the shortfalls of this mode of critical urban theory. In particular, Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans (Reference Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans2012) detect a spatial closure within discussions of the right to the city, such that all grievances and injustices are reduced to the urban level and all action must be urban in nature and scale. Purcell (Reference Purcell2006) terms this closure the ‘local trap’ and suggests that work on the right to the city may risk the uncritical prioritisation of ‘the interests of local residents over wider publics’ in a belief that the ‘local urban scale’ is by necessity more democratic (Purcell Reference Purcell2006: 1923). By contrast, Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans (Reference Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans2012: 2546) suggest that a relational understanding of cities and social movements is required, one that reflects the manner in which ‘movements emanate from cities but also stretch outwards’. It is this outward orientation and direction of the human rights claims made through the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign that highlights how the city is being employed here as a site to articulate demands directed towards effecting policy at a national level. We should recognise however that this is an articulation which is neither reflective of a human rights city in the strictest sense nor a call for the right to the city.

There is a need to be careful not to celebrate too easily this convergence of human rights and the politics of the city. Whilst this campaign has been influential in shifting public attitudes on asylum destitution and in gaining local authority support for policy change, these successes have been both fragmented and limited when compared to the policy-led violations of human rights that enforced destitution denotes in the UK context. Without the ability to fully shape policy, either at an urban or a national level, there is a risk that a campaign such as this becomes emblematic of that ‘moral urbanism’ (Darling Reference Darling2013) discussed previously. Thus whilst local authorities may have passed motions supporting an end to destitution and expressing opposition to government policy, their extremely limited ability to practically support destitute asylum seekers is left unchanged by this move, not least in a context of fiscal austerity and its urban manifestation. In a context in which asylum and immigration legislation and policy is strongly centralised, cities who support the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign may assert their support for destitute asylum seekers without having to necessarily actualise that support in any meaningful way. This is what Davis (in this volume) warns against as a formation of ‘rhetoric without accountability’, evident in a number of US cities which have sought to draw upon human rights frameworks without fully committing to the political and legislative demands of such frameworks (see also Kamuf Ward in this volume). The danger here is that human rights principles and values become values to be supported but only in an abstract manner, they become principles without the capacity for action.

More worryingly, this implies that whilst social movements and contention within cities may employ a language of human rights, this confluence may also be utilised by national governments and others as a means to maintain the status quo. Just as Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans (Reference Uitermark, Nicholls and Loopmans2012: 2546) argue that cities are places of contention, they also note that such practices inevitably produce new means of control and ordering as ‘local states and their partners develop strategies and techniques to direct the ebbs and flows of contentiousness constantly bubbling up from the urban grassroots’. In this context, as Morris (Reference Morris2012: 42) argues, rights themselves may act as modes of governance which ‘stratify, discipline and divide’. The ‘civic stratification’ of immigration and asylum rights that delineate opportunities and entitlements according to citizenship status is thus one means through which ‘the differential granting or denial of rights by the state’ reproduces a ‘system of inequality’ in the name of national security and border maintenance (Morris Reference Morris2009: 621). A key challenge for the concept of the human rights city is therefore in maintaining the critical character of a turn to human rights, maintaining a focus on the value of seeking and effecting social change, despite attempts to co-opt such a notion for the purposes of city branding and the reification of particular ‘urban values’ (Darling Reference Darling2013; Osborne and Rose Reference Osborne and Rose1999).

The danger of ‘moral urbanism’ is reflected in those different interpretations of social change and transformation that orientate discussions of the right to the city. For Purcell (Reference Purcell2003) and others who align themselves with a radically insurgent model of the right to the city, the notion of a human rights city would be a largely uninspiring socio-legal concept, an assemblage of interests and values that may do little to radically transform the present. I would suggest that this risks setting the bar of social transformation too high. Rather, as a range of authors have suggested, on issues of citizenship, migrant rights, asylum and race relations, social and political change has more often been produced through combinations of claims-making, performative and disruptive acts, the critical questioning of existing conditions and incremental processes of tying together disparate struggles and agendas (Connolly Reference Connolly2005; Darling Reference Darling2014; Nash Reference Nash2012; Uitermark and Nicholls Reference Uitermark and Nicholls2014). Within such a formation, the connections forged between cities as sites of contention and human rights principles as orientation points for policy, critique and claims-making, may be one means of advancing the rights of asylum seekers. To do so, however, such a human rights agenda must retain two central attributes. The first is a responsibility to those most affected by human rights violations. Grigolo (Reference Grigolo, Hynes, Lamb, Short and Waites2011) argues that this is what a focus on the city enables due to the proximity of the urban to the lives of vulnerable populations, yet the risk of ‘moral urbanism’ is that this link is a one-way relation of authority. To ensure that the socially transformative potential of human rights are maintained, there needs to be recognition that rights are ‘not fruitfully conceived as possessions. Rights are relationships, not things; they are institutionally defined rules specifying what people can do in relation to one another’ (Young Reference Young1990: 25). In this sense, demands for rights must be negotiated on the grounds of communication between groups, individuals and institutions, and cannot be assumed to reflect only pre-existing frames of human rights law.

This leads to the second key attribute, that of maintaining a concern with critique. Whilst social transformation need not be as radical as some proponents of the right to the city agenda imply, human rights can never be accomplished once and for all. If rights are conceived as relationships and practices, then by necessity they are never final or fixed. As such, they demand debate and critique just as government policy on immigration and asylum demand such interrogation. As Frate (in this volume), reminds us, cities themselves have rights as actors on national, and increasingly international, stages. And as the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign implies, cities and municipal authorities can adopt a critical role in relation to government policy, but they must ensure that such a role is not simply an isolated voicing of dissent. Taken together, these two conditions imply that a city can be an engaged critic of policy. This means both being engaged with the claims and questions of those most vulnerable among its inhabitants, and being critical not simply of policies that maintain such vulnerability but also of the limits of human rights principles themselves.

The urbanisation of human rights

In this chapter, I have sought to explore the concept of the human rights city from the perspective of a UK system in which municipal authority and influence is limited. In particular, this is the case around the substantive issue being discussed here, policies on support and accommodation for asylum seekers. Given this context, I have argued that with the dispersal of asylum seekers to a range of UK cities, the conditions for mobilising campaigns around human rights were established and whilst such campaigns have sporadically emerged, these have not yet been translated into the form of localised policy influence and wider opposition that has been associated with the human rights city. This does not, however, mean that the language of human rights has not been employed to orientate and communicate campaigns for asylum seeker justice within British cities. The ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign provides one example of how such a connection has been forged in the hope of effecting government policy through incremental processes of critique, awareness raising and garnering public support. Changes within the asylum system and its political manifestation are by no means inevitable, and campaigns such as this may have limited traction in some areas of government, yet without such challenges change is even less likely. Perceptions and policies on asylum, support and entitlements are altered not immediately but incrementally, as critical questions are posed in and through the political opportunities and limits that cities provide (Uitermark and Nicholls Reference Uitermark and Nicholls2014).

We might question, however, to what extent this model of incremental critique reflects the socio-legal conditions of a ‘human rights city’. I think it is clear that in the UK context, none of the cities involved in this campaign are strictly ‘human rights cities’ in the sense described in the introduction to this volume (see Oomen in this volume). They have neither the autonomy, nor perhaps the will, to fully embrace human rights principles and laws as part of their policy agenda, and this is certainly the case in relation to the rights of asylum seekers given the connection between asylum, citizenship and national sovereignty. Yet this should not diminish entirely their willingness to engage with such a campaign and with critical practices when it comes to asylum policy. In cases such as this, I would suggest viewing the category of the human rights city as only one possible articulation of the relationship between urban social movements and human rights principles. The human rights city may be the most developed and most legally embedded form of such a relationship, but it also implies a fixity and closure that is rare in practice as Grigolo (Reference Grigolo, Hynes, Lamb, Short and Waites2011) reminds us. Cities may be working towards such a status, or seeking to enact social justice without the capacity to formalise such claims in policy on specific areas such as asylum. In these cases, human rights principles and legal structures may still be useful tools, means to focus attention and collaboration on goals of social justice, but may not be codified into explicit legal frameworks in finite ways (see Soja Reference Soja2010). Rather, here we might focus on how rights are not simply ‘given’ or bestowed, but are actively ‘made’ from the ‘bottom up’, from campaigns, activists, movements, pragmatic negotiations and Mayoral influence as Kamuf Ward (in this volume) and Neubeck (in this volume) suggest in their studies of the US landscape of human rights ‘at home’ (see also Goodale and Merry Reference Goodale, Goodale and Merry2007; Merry Reference Merry2006c).

One implication of cases such as the one discussed here is to suggest that there is a need to be concerned not only with human rights cities, but also with the broader urbanisation of human rights. Urbanisation in this context refers not simply to a process of city formation and expansion, but rather following Lefebvre's (Reference Lefebvre2003) discussion of ‘planetary urbanism’ to the development and translation of urban ways of life. For Lefebvre, urbanisation marked the increasing reach of urban practices and perceptions into all aspects of everyday life, suggesting an increasingly connected, interrelated and networked experience of social and political life (Madden Reference Madden2012; Merrifield Reference Merrifield2011). For the practice and discussion of human rights, this implies a more fluid and less final application than the territorial fixity and legislative certainty of the human rights city. The urbanisation of human rights implies a concern with how human rights are mobilised as part of urban environments and ways of life even when they are not necessarily fixed and codified in legal practice. Human rights cities are part of this urbanisation process, but only one manifestation of it, alongside those struggles, contentions and movements who mobilise human rights and the opportunities that urbanisation poses for social change. The urbanisation of human rights is therefore as much about the processes of critique and questioning which are produced when human rights principles are enacted through the urban, as it is about the fixing of human rights to a particular end point or policy agenda. For asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, mobilised and active in dispersal cities as part of the ‘Dignity not Destitution’ campaign, the ideal of a city that respects and enshrines their right to support and refuge may seem a distant one. Yet, it is through the urbanisation of human rights, the processes through which rights are claimed, negotiated and critiqued as part of urban life that such an ideal may be kept alive.

Introduction

As we made our way through the narrow alleys that cut across Nima and Maamobi, two adjacent low-income communities in Accra, Ghana, Joe,Footnote ¹ a local human rights activist, updated me about some of the recent events in the community. We passed concrete and plywood homes and small shops, while navigating around livestock and the deteriorating open drains that bisect many of the walkways. There are only a few roads in the community that are large enough for vehicles, so residents generally travel by way of the labyrinth of paths that wind through the densely populated neighbourhoods. Nima and Maamobi, although not officially separate municipalities, joined together to become a self-designated human rights city.

In addition to their status as a human rights city, the two neighbourhoods are united by the fact that they are often perceived by outsiders as being distinct from the surrounding city. In contrast to the rest of Accra, which is largely Christian and relatively wealthy, Nima and Maamobi have a large Islamic population and many residents are significantly poorer than other Accra residents. The neighbourhoods of Nima and Maamobi are unplanned and have long carried the reputation of being migrant communities. In 1973, Grindal estimated that 90 per cent of the communities’ population ‘is ethnically non-indigenous, consisting of northern tribesmen and a significantly large proportion of non-Ghanaians from northern Togo and Upper Volta’ (1973: 335). Some residents feel that the ethnic, religious, and economic diversity of the area has led them to be treated by policy makers as non-indigenous and transitory, and therefore less worthy of much-needed development funds.

In this chapter, I argue that the status of the Nima and Maamobi human rights city (as a ‘city within a city’ (White Reference White and Cummings2011: 275)) poses unique challenges for local human rights activists. One of the primary challenges faced by local activists is how to pursue large-scale community development projects using the human rights framework rather than the system of political patronage, which is prevalent in Ghana. Although common across Ghana (Hasty Reference Hasty2005; Lentz Reference Lentz1998; Nugent Reference Nugent1995), strong patronage relationships are particularly prevalent in unplanned communities where residents often find difficulty accessing things like employment, credit, and government officials (Fox Reference Fox2014). Due to the pervasiveness of patronage exchanges in the community, human rights activists often struggle to navigate the political terrain of obtaining funding and meetings with government officials while remaining non-partisan. Because of this, many activists have developed innovative strategies for building relationships with politicians while attempting to remain true to the ideals of the human rights city.

This case study is a valuable contribution to the larger conversations about human rights cities for several reasons. First, it examines how the ideals of the human rights cities model may be successfully adapted to communities that are only part of larger cities. Oomen (in this volume) notes that the human rights city model allows municipalities to create vertical alliances, bypassing states that may not be as eager to embrace human rights ideals. Similarly, Nima and Maamobi have in some ways been able to bypass the city of Accra, a city that has historically neglected the two communities. Second, it considers the additional pressures faced by human rights activists in lower-income countries where resources are in high demand and short supply.

The data in the chapter is drawn from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork on human rights activism in Accra, Ghana (June-July 2010, July–August 2011, June–November 2013 and March–April 2014). During the course of fieldwork, I attended meetings with community groups and conducted interviews with their members, human rights activists, as well as local and state authorities involved in various community development projects. I accompanied local activists to their meetings with community stakeholders, opinion leaders, and human rights lawyers. I used a mixed-methods approach of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, community surveys, and archival research to study the topics of human rights, community activism, and political identity within two low-income communities in Accra, Ghana's capital city.

Human rights in Nima and Maamobi: a very brief history

In 1902, when Maamobi first appeared on the Gold Coast colonial census, there were thirteen residents, and the area was outside of the city limits of Accra. Nima was first settled in 1931 by a Hausa cattle dealer named Alhaji Amadu Futa (Ainuson Reference Ainuson2009). Although both communities were generally considered suburban pastoral areas at the time, by 1947, the official Accra Town Planning Scheme noted increased population in Nima due to ‘untoward labour immigration’.Footnote ² Due to the rapid population growth, Nima and Maamobi were already densely populated by the time the city limits were extended, incorporating the two communities into Accra. Because development occurred while the neighbourhoods were outside of the city limits, growth was unregulated. Residents constructed homes, kiosks, and mosques wherever they could find land, many without direct access to roads, water, or electricity (Harvey and Brand Reference Harvey and Brand1974). In 1958, Nima was officially designated as a slum (Ministry of Housing 1958). In the ensuing years, Nima and Maamobi continued to grow, and by 2000, population estimates for Nima alone ranged from 55,830 (Kang et al. Reference Kang, Pescina, Colin, Quashigah and Kumashie2010: 2) to 69,044 (Abdul Aziz Reference Abdul Aziz2012: 11). Living conditions continued to deteriorate and little was done to improve local infrastructure. The neighbourhood also developed a reputation for violent crime, culminating in the highly publicised arrest of a notorious group of local armed robbers in 2005 (Ntewusu Reference Ntewusu2005). Because of the community's poverty and reputation, residents often struggled to attain access to justice and social services.

Motivated by these challenges, in 1997, two University of Ghana law students opened a human rights organisation within the community called the Legal Resources Centre (LRC). The model that they chose to implement was inspired by similar human rights-based legal aid centres around the world. In fact, one of the organisation's founders, Mahama Ayariga, was an intern at the well-known South African Legal Resources Centre, the Ghanaian LRC's namesake. Soon after its inception, the LRC began working with PDHRE, the People's Movement for Human Rights Learning, to establish a human rights city in Nima and Maamobi. This relationship emerged after another of the LRC's founders, Raymond Atuguba, attended Harvard Law School and began collaborations with several faculty members and human rights organisations in the United States, including PDHRE. The interaction between the LRC's founders and human rights organisations in other countries speaks to the way that knowledge moves and is ‘translated’ between the global and the local (Merry Reference Merry2006b). In this case, both the ideals of a human rights city as well as the organisational structure were transposed and adapted to fit the local context.

Between 1999 and 2000 the Legal Resources Centre hosted community leaders’ forums, and in 2001, after thirteen months of planning, the human rights city in Nima-Maamobi was established (PHDRE 2007). The Nima–Maamobi human rights city did not come to fruition through formal government recognition. In contrast to human rights cities such as Rosario (Marks, Modrowski and Lichem Reference Marks, Modrowski and Lichem2008) and Graz (Starl in this volume), there was no formal agreement declaring Nima and Maamobi a human rights city. To say that the city was ‘established’ in 2001 recognises the fact that this was the year in which community leaders (such as chiefs, opinion leaders, and assembly members) officially took on the challenge of meeting the human rights goals that had been developed during the previous planning phase. These goals were ensconced in several documents, including Organisational Strategic Plans developed by various community-based organisations (PDHRE 2007). It is important to note, however, that the commitment to the human rights city as well as its strategic goals was moral, rather than legal, in nature.

In 1997, when the LRC first began its work (and only five years after Ghana transitioned from military rule to a democracy), the country was experiencing tremendous growth in the NGO sector and in the use of human rights discourse (Opoku-Mensah Reference Opoku-Mensah, Opoku-Mensah, Lewis and Tvedt2007). The previous forty years had been turbulent, with many regime changes and fluctuating respect for human rights. Although the country's engagement with human rights has not been consistent, the use of rights language extends back to the years surrounding the country's struggle for independence when Kwame Nkrumah rejected European colonialism as a violation of the ‘fundamental human right’ of self-determination (Nkrumah Reference Nkrumah1958: 46).

The 1992 Constitution of Ghana also reflects the post-Cold War global shift toward human rights discourse, and several of the document's provisions directly reflect portions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the African Charter on Human and People's Rights (Kludze Reference Kludze2008). The fifth chapter of the 1992 Constitution of Ghana outlines the ‘fundamental human rights and freedoms’ of all Ghanaian citizens, and many of the human rights described in international treaties and declarations are incorporated into domestic law by means of this chapter. The Constitution also makes provisions for a special Human Rights Court devoted to adjudicating cases related to this chapter of the Constitution and a non-judicial institution called the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) mandated to ‘protect fundamental human rights and to ensure good governance for every person in Ghana’.Footnote ³

Within this formalised human rights context, the LRC began its work in Nima and Maamobi. Although many other human rights cities around the world have used their promotion of human rights as a way to ‘differentiate themselves from others’ (Berends et al. Reference Berends, Hamaker, Hoff, Goossens, Hadtstein and Van Gerven2013: 26), activists in Nima and Maamobi more often discuss human rights as a tool with which they can become more similar to other communities. For example, one lawyer stated that human rights activists in the area ‘are trying to make it so that it is not like you are moving from one town to the other when you move from here (Maamobi) to Airport Residential’Footnote ⁴ (personal communication, 5 March 2014). Similarly, at a community human rights forum, a local chief stated: ‘Our community, the area is not a great distance from the seat of the President, but it feels very far, like a village, a village where pregnant woman are carried! Where the sick are carried to be able to reach a road’ (personal communication, 5 March 2014). For community activists, a human rights-based approach to lobbying is a tool to address what they see as discrimination and inequality within the larger city limits.

The LRC primarily operates through its connections with several community-based organisationsFootnote ⁵ in Nima and Maamobi. Several of these groups were created by the LRC as umbrella organisations to unite previously existing small community clubs into larger entities. Others existed as more informal groups that have now grown into very visible advocacy organisations. Staff at the LRC have targeted the members of these clubs for human rights education and capacity building programs with the intention that these clubs will then take on the primary responsibility of mobilising other community residents, an approach referred to by many LRC staff members as ‘training of trainers’. Over the course of the thirteen years that the human rights city has been in place, these community-based organisations have used a human rights-based approach to advocate for, and successfully achieve, enforcement of a law guaranteeing an exemption of health care user fees on the grounds of poverty (Perelman and Young Reference Perelman, Young, White and Perelman2010), improved community-police relations, and even for municipal street lights within the community to be turned back on after months of abeyance. Community-based organisations have also used the human rights approach to lobby for the construction of a concrete drain to replace an existing, and continually deteriorating, drainage ditch that runs for over a mile within the community, a campaign that has been on-going for over eight years. Rather than targeting a specific set of rights, the model of human rights activism encouraged by the LRC in Nima and Maamobi has been focused on a specific set of procedures. For example, in all of the cases mentioned above, the human rights approach to advocacy focused on conducting an assessment of the problem and locating the government official or department responsible for the issue. The approach specifically targets government officials, as they are conduits of the state and therefore seen as the duty bearers of rights fulfilment. Activists would then directly approach these individuals with their claims, grounded in the language of human rights. On occasion, when they struggled to achieve results, demonstrations were planned and the groups took to local media to bring attention to the problem.Footnote ⁶ Although these examples of advocacy could have taken place regardless of whether Nima and Maamobi were human rights cities, the designation has allowed for a normative continuity in the community that has persisted over time, and activists have continued to draw from this philosophical foundation when mobilising the community around various campaigns.

A ‘city within a city’

In its establishment of a human rights city in Nima and Maamobi, the LRC has embraced many of the ideals of the human rights cities model including the use of a steering committee to determine community priorities and extensive human rights learning programming. At the same time, the Nima and Maamobi human rights city diverges from the established model. PDHRE has established a very specific methodology ‘for the formation of a human rights city’ (Oomen and Baumgärtel Reference Oomen2014: 714). Despite this outlined structure, as the introduction of this volume describes, there is wide variation in the actual form that human rights cities take around the world.

As discussed above, human rights are codified in Ghana in the country's constitution. Despite the formalisation of human rights law, lawyers and activists often struggle to compel enforcement of these laws. In Nima and Maamobi, much of the advocacy has therefore been focused on finding innovative ways to makes claims for human rights. Although the LRC has provided pro bono legal representation for many individuals in a variety of cases, most of the activism for community-wide human rights issues (like access to healthcare and sanitation) has occurred outside of the courtroom in the form of press releases, petitions, and demonstrations. The threat of court action, however, is regularly employed by both community residents and human rights lawyers.

One of the biggest challenges to the fulfilment of rights faced by activists in Nima and Maamobi descends from a factor that differentiates the community from most other human rights cities: the fact that they do not have their own municipal government. Marks, Modrowski, and Lichem (Reference Marks, Modrowski and Lichem2008: 45) state that one of the goals of a human rights city is to allow residents to use their knowledge of human rights ‘to influence laws, policies, resource allocation and relationships in ways that effectively realise political, civil, economic, social, and cultural rights’. Berends et al. concur, stating that cities are ‘appropriate spaces for the local implementation of human rights’ largely because they ‘form legal local authorities’ (2013: 27). Because Nima and Maamobi are not independent cities, they do not have separate laws or budgets. Resource allocation, development plans, and legal reform are all controlled by policy makers at the municipal level, policy makers who may have interests that do not align with the priorities established within the human rights ‘cities’ of Nima and Maamobi. In this way, the communities lack the institutionalisation of rights experienced by other human rights cities, such as Barcelona and Graz (Berends et al. Reference Berends, Hamaker, Hoff, Goossens, Hadtstein and Van Gerven2013). Without institutional support for human rights, activists are often faced with the challenge of advocating for human rights amidst pre-existing power structures, political priorities, and funding practices. The ethnographic examples in the following sections explore these obstacles in relation to one human rights campaign in the community as well as the controversy that has emerged over how some activists have attempted to cope with these challenges.

The slum upgrade project

According to a 2008 report issued by UN-Habitat, entitled ‘State of the World's Cities’, there are over 800 million people around the globe living in slums. The Millennium Development goals acknowledge this by setting a goal to ‘achieve, by 2020, a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers’ (Target 7D of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals). Despite the fact that the United Nations considers this goal to have been met ‘well in advance of the 2020 deadline’, slums remain a pervasive problem in many countries around the world. In 2005, 63 per cent of the urban population in Sub-Saharan Africa and 45.4 per cent of the urban population in Ghana lived in slums (UN-Habitat 2010: 179–180). Specifically in Accra, 58 per cent of the population lives in unplanned settlements (UN-Habitat 2009). Within this context, the Ghanaian government instituted a ‘Participatory Slum Upgrading and Prevention’ project, funded through UN-Habitat (Accra Metropolitan Assembly 2011). In 2013, members of the community in Nima and Maamobi were approached by the LRC with the news that their neighbourhoods had been selected as pilot communities for a new National Slum Upgrading Project.Footnote ⁷ This project would target several communities within Accra with the intention of expanding to encompass other areas in Ghana in the future. The project utilises a human rights-based approach to development, recognising the move of UN-Habitat and other organisations toward a ‘right to the city’ understanding of urban development (Kothari and Chaudhry Reference Kothari and Chaudhry2009; UN-Habitat 2010).Footnote ⁸

Nima and Maamobi were logical choices to pilot the project for several reasons. First, although the communities do not reflect the level of human rights institutionalisation found in many other human rights cities, there is a relatively organised and active network of individuals and groups involved in human rights causes already in place. This feature of the community is important as the project is being shaped with the help of the LRC to incorporate a human rights perspective when establishing the development plan. Second, the community is closely tied to the President at the time, John Dramani Mahama. When the project was initiated, Raymond Atuguba, one of the LRC's founders, was serving as President Mahama's Executive Secretary. In addition to this, Nima and Maamobi have been the focus of many academic studies over the years,Footnote ⁹ so there is a relatively large amount of data on the development needs and challenges of the community. Most notable, and often cited by residents, is the fact that the Millennium Cities Initiative research team from Columbia University's Earth Institute came to Nima to conduct mapping exercises (see Kang et al. Reference Kang, Pescina, Colin, Quashigah and Kumashie2010) and produce intricate design plans for the redevelopment of the community.Footnote ¹⁰

The new slum upgrade project incorporates community participation as a central tenet. Because of this, multiple community stakeholder meetings were held, beginning in June 2013. Although the project is supported by the central government, concerns raised by community members at these meetings speak to the contentious context of human rights activism to which residents have become accustomed. In addition, meetings about the slum upgrade project and other on-going advocacy projects have reignited debates amongst community activists about the relationship between party politics and human rights in Ghana.

‘One talkshop is one too many’

It is a misty morning in June when around forty people gather in a large hall on the outskirts of Nima and Maamobi for the first community stakeholders meeting about the upcoming slum upgrade project. In attendance are chiefs, youth leaders, women's representatives, local politicians, and opinion leaders in addition to several members of an international team of human rights advocates. The meeting would be the first of several meetings to occur over the course of a year. Although these meetings did not always have the same composition (some were large general community forums while others were smaller ‘steering committee’ meetings) several overarching themes emerged that shed light on the context of human rights activism within the Nima and Maamobi human rights city.

At the inaugural meetings held in June 2013, community residents sat and listened to the description of the project provided by staff member of the LRC and representatives from the international team. One of the lawyers described how the project would help to address areas where the community's development had been neglected in the past such as roads, sanitation, water, and schools. He also recalled some of the past situations in which community members had successfully used human rights language to frame their claims. When the floor was opened up for comment, many residents noted their support for human rights and the project in general. As one resident noted, ‘this is not an issue of humanitarianism. It is an issue of rights, that we rightly deserve this development’. Many of the same attendees, however, also expressed their scepticism concerning the project's funding and implementation. One resident stated:

Another concurred:

These comments reveal an overarching scepticism among community residents who have seen many planning stakeholder meetings come and go without project implementation. Within the human rights city, even if individuals do embrace the ideals of human rights and incorporate them into their lives, if the approach fails to yield results, either because of lack of funding or political will, community support may falter. In her research on battered women, Merry (Reference Merry2003) found that the chances of individuals continuing to represent their community as a ‘rights bearing’ community is largely dependent on the way that their claims are received. When claims framed in the language of human rights fail to produce results (in Merry's example, when police do not make an arrest or when prosecutors do not press charges) individuals may be less likely to represent themselves using human rights language in the future. The choice to frame a claim in a particular way (i.e. as a human rights or as a community obligation) is often a strategic one. Therefore, if a frame fails to achieve results, it may quickly be abandoned for another.

But the exasperated statement made by one community activist toward the end of the meeting alludes to the complicated nature of negotiating for human rights fulfilment in Ghana. He stated: ‘We have been denied our rights because we are poor. So with all respect, we stand on our rights, but they (politicians) will just say yes or no’. A few days later, I was walking with a young man who is a member of one of the neighbourhood community-based organisations, and we were discussing the meeting. I asked about the comment and questioned whether he thought walking into a Minister's office and telling him that the community had a human right to this development project would be effective. He paused for a minute and then responded: ‘I don't know. I think it would be difficult. If I said that to him, he would just say “yes, and it is everybody's right, so why should you get this project and not them?”’ When we discussed this further, the activist explained that everyone knows there is limited money in Ghana and that not every project can be funded. Some activists therefore believe that even if you have a right, and even if it has been legally upheld, fulfilling this right will always require ‘a favour’ from someone powerful. As I began to ask more community activists about this question, I learned that this belief was both commonly held and highly contentious.

The challenge of resource allocation

One of the primary challenges faced by community activists in Nima and Maamobi is a lack of resources. The difficulties posed by a shortage of finances are apparent at several levels. Community groups struggle with obtaining money for programs and community mobilisation activities, and the community as a whole must fight to win coveted places in the national budget for their development needs. The degree of difficulty in obtaining resources for infrastructure projects has become apparent to residents over the past few years as they have attempted to gain funding to rehabilitate a deteriorating drainage ditch that runs for over a mile within their communities. In the summer of 2011, after six years of actively lobbying the government for funds to build a concrete drain, the Ghanaian Parliament passed a supplementary budget, including 6,608,697 GH₵ (about $3,486,823 at the time) for the completion of the Nima drains. Three years later, after multiple charges of corruption with various contractors and difficulties obtaining the money from the government in a timely fashion, only a small portion of the drain has been built.

One of the problems that activists face when pursuing projects such as this is Ghana's system of political patronage. Patronage relationships are, by nature, hierarchical. The relationship can be described as reciprocal in that both parties obtain some benefit from patron–client transactions. However, the relationship differs from one of balanced reciprocity where the goods or services exchanged are relatively equal in value. In patronage, the goods exchanged between patron and client are not equivalent. The patron will provide tangible items such as money, food, or material goods, while the client will reciprocate with ‘intangible assets’ such as popularity, information, political loyalty (Wolf Reference Schmidt, Guasti, Landè and Scott1977: 174).

Scholars argue that political patronage is particularly pervasive in sub-Saharan Africa due to a combination of weak post-colonial state institutions and pre-colonial practices that have allowed politicians to gain and uphold political power by participating in patron–client relationships with their constituents (Hyden Reference Hyden2005). Patronage relationships are common in Ghana, particularly at the constituency level. In his study of clientelism in Ghana, Lindberg (Reference Lindberg2003: 124) found that Ghanaian parliamentarians regularly partake in paying for ‘schools fees, electricity and water bills, funeral and wedding expenses; or distributing cutlasses and other tools for agriculture, or even handing out ‘chop-money’ (small cash sums)’ to their constituents.

My ethnographic data supports these findings. In Nima and Maamobi, local-level politicians regularly pay for school fees, help facilitate travel to Mecca to perform Hajj, and assist residents in making connections with higher level government officials to address various personal and community needs. One member of the party's constituency leadership noted that although it is not the responsibility of politicians to participate in clientelism, ‘if you don't do it, it is a big problem, you have a big problem’ (personal communication, 12 March 2014). Other members of the party leadership similarly noted that if politicians did not participate in these forms of exchange, they would not be re-elected. My interviews with lower-level party members confirm these concerns. Both Nima and Maamobi have historically been strongholds of the current ruling party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC). Because of this, many individuals state that they feel they should be rewarded for their loyalty and their efforts in campaigning for political leaders. Individual party members often rely on patron–client relationships to address personal problems such as funding education and obtaining access to other state offices and institutions. Because of this reliance, many party members have expressed in my interviews with them that they would most likely not openly criticise leaders within their party.

Although patron-client relationships can occur at any level, McCauley (Reference McCauley2012: 5) notes that in Africa, patronage resources generally originate from within the state. Patrons access resources through their connections with those in various public offices who then provide goods such as schools, roads, and jobs to well-connected patrons and communities. In my interviews with them, political party members noted that a benefit of their party membership was having access to governmental offices and officials who could assist them in tasks such as obtaining visas, gaining employment, and being given introduction letters to other more powerful political officials. As an active member of the ruling party, one is able to obtain meetings with local and constituency level politicians, who then route the request to the appropriate channel. Without these connections (or worse, as a member of the opposition party), it can often be very difficult to obtain meetings with government officials.

A human rights-based approach stands in potential conflict with these forms of patronage reciprocity. Patronage is inherently a vertical, hierarchical relationship. Human rights discourse, however, ideally operates as a horizontal communication founded on notions of equality. The basic principles of non-discrimination are at the foundation of human rights philosophy. In contrast, Wolf (1966: 86) defines patronage as ‘a socially or politically or economically superior person in a vertical relation with his social, political, or economic inferior. The tie is asymmetrical.’ All of the community-based organisations that I observed engaging in human rights-based advocacy also differed from the standard patronage system in that they are all officially non-partisan. Leaders of these groups cited various reasons for remaining non-partisan including the ability to work with government officials regardless of the current party in power and the fact that being neutral allowed them to speak out against politicians without risk of personal repercussions. One activist noted that remaining non-partisan allowed him to more freely criticise the government:

Another activist directly acknowledged the patronage system and its impact on the expression of discontent and disagreement in the country. She stated:

Between rights and reciprocity

Although all of the activists that I spoke with agreed that their organisations should remain non-partisan, they were split on whether, as individuals, they should be actively involved in political parties. Many activists do remain non-partisan for the reasons discussed above. Others, however, feel that because of Ghana's lack of resources, they must maintain connections with politicians if the rights of their communities are ever to be fulfilled. These individuals have made an effort to develop innovative strategies for claiming the things already officially entitled to them by Ghanaian law, attempting to combine the values of a human rights-based approach with reciprocity-based participation in party politics. By using various methods, such as media advocacy, demonstrations, and working through connections with political party officials, these flexible strategies often offer activists increased opportunities for negotiation. For example, individuals who have used this approach in the past often describe how they are able to get meetings with government officials when other non-partisan members of their groups cannot.

One member of a local youth club who is also involved in party politics explained his decision this way: ‘With politics, they have power which [our club] lacks. They can control resources. [We] can only make noise. It takes policy makers to decide whether or not to listen. And executives might listen more to those in their party than to people in a civil society group’ (personal communication, 30 March 2014). Other activists similarly stated that being active in political parties allowed them more opportunities for gaining meetings with duty bearers. Because they had access to duty bearers, they feel that they are more able to establish a productive dialogue to affect change rather than only using conflict-based methods such as demonstrations, which can be costly both financially and in terms of social capital.

Griffiths’ (Reference Griffiths1996) study of women's access to law in Botswana illustrates the potential importance of social connections for individuals who are attempting to address legal issues amidst power asymmetries. Griffiths’ study found that factors such as gender, education, economic capital and social networks impacted the options of women who were attempting to make claims against their male partners for issues such as property rights and child maintenance. Women who did not have economic capital or political connections often did not have the power to enter into dispute negotiations whereas those with extensive social networks were more able to engage in negotiations against their partners (1996: 97–98). In this way, Griffith's study reveals that individuals’ ability to engage with the legal process ‘is directly related to their non-legal power networks’ (1996: 93).

In many ways, Griffith's study sheds light on the strategy being attempted by some activists in Nima and Maamobi. By engaging in party politics without abandoning their advocacy efforts, activists are attempting to increase their access to social networks, institutional knowledge, and resources. Community activists may draw support from the transnational community when they employ a human rights-based approach (such as the international team that attended the first stakeholder's meeting about the slum upgrade project), but they may still struggle to obtain resources. By opening their social network to include politicians, they potentially increase their power to negotiate for their interests.

The situation in Ghana, however, is also different in significant ways, as activists in Nima and Maamobi also potentially risk losing social capital by becoming involved in party politics. There are several reasons why this may happen. First, human rights activists and politicians do not always share the same interests. In the example of the slum upgrade project, for example, the renewal plan being promoted by the LRC includes a holistic, participatory, and equitable approach to development. Although the slum upgrade project is officially sponsored by the central government, there are many levels of officials and elites who may have competing interests in relation to the speed and direction of the project. For example, recent research on slums suggests that the continued existence of slums today is partially due to the fact that there are many individuals who benefit from the underdevelopment of African cities, including politicians, due to patronage systems (Fox Reference Fox2014). It is very likely that individuals who benefit from this underdevelopment might not agree with a renewal plan guided by human rights principles.

More generally, there is often a conflict between civil society and political parties in Ghana over what they consider to be appropriate forms of lobbying. Throughout the course of the various stakeholder meetings, a human rights approach was discussed as a tool to hold government officials accountable. One LRC staff member stated: ‘In every urban renewal program, you will have competing interests…The only way we can resist is for us to come together. We have to speak with one voice. If we are not careful, they (the government) will try to divide us and then say ‘oh look, they are divided, we can do what we want’ (personal communication, 19 June 2013). The ability to hold governments accountable for transgressions is touted throughout the literature on human rights specifically, and civil society more generally. In this model, it is human rights advocates who are supposed to create conflict, make noise, and ‘name and shame’.

On the other hand, as mentioned above, political parties in Ghana tend to discourage public criticism, especially in the form of demonstrations, from their own party members as it is seen as helping the opposition party. When several members of one of the community-based organisations became more visibly involved in the NDC, some activists who have remained non-partisan openly expressed their concern because they believed it would inhibit their ability to take a strong stand against the policies of the ruling party. Activists who have become involved in party politics have likewise experienced some pushback from party leadership who see them as hard to control and potential sources for public criticism. Activists who are attempting to engage in both party politics and human rights advocacy have the potential for more flexible negotiations and access to resources, but if they do not maintain a careful balance between the two domains, they also risk a loss of support from either one or both spheres.

A second potential risk involves the way that the groups are perceived by the community. As one activist explains:

Community activists in part draw their strength from their ability to mobilise other members of their community. This is especially true in the ‘training of trainers’ model employed by the LRC. If too many members of the groups become visibly partisan, they run the risk of being perceived as part of a political party and alienating members of their community who do not share their political beliefs. Likewise, groups run the risk of being marked as partisan and then finding it difficult to operate when the party in power changes. More generally, the procedures associated with human rights that are most often promoted by both local and international human rights NGOs place a focus on universalism and impersonal legality, whereas claims made on the basis of political loyalty and obligation are grounded in notions of relationships and reciprocity. As these approaches are foundationally distinct, this procedural pluralism may lead to conflicts among community actors.

Conclusion

In much of the literature on the human rights cities model that is presented by PDHRE, there is a mention of the goal of ‘moving charity to dignity’ (Koenig Reference Koenig, Marks, Modrowski and Lichem2008: 9). The examples described above, however, illustrate the challenges of separating human rights and charity in a context where a human rights city does not have the power to influence budgetary decisions. In Nima and Maamobi, because policy makers involved in the human rights city project are disconnected from those making decisions about budgetary allocations, activists face many challenges in obtaining resources. To cope with these obstacles, activists often feel that they must engage in the competing normative system of party politics in addition to their human rights work. In their study of human rights cities across Europe, Berends et al. (Reference Berends, Hamaker, Hoff, Goossens, Hadtstein and Van Gerven2013) found the economic situation to be the largest barrier to a well-functioning human rights city. They argue that for human rights cities that are ‘not municipality driven, one has to be creative to find funds’ (2013: 174–175). For activists in Nima and Maamobi, ‘being creative’ may mean choosing to engage in both party politics and human rights activism, even though the interests of the two spheres of action are often at odds. Although this may allow activists to more readily advance their current claims, it also may have additional consequences. Some argue that attempting to balance both systems potentially leaves activists less able to loudly hold government officials accountable and also supports a system of political patronage that may complicate the work of future activists. As a result, the complications surrounding securing funding for human rights-based development projects also impact the potential of the human rights city model to affect systemic change and alter existing power structures.

As the ethnographic data in this chapter illustrates, there is not a consensus about the best way to proceed. Community residents support the human rights approach, but also urgently need the funding required to address local problems such as lack of adequate sanitation, roads, and water provision. The examples in this chapter illustrate the contested nature of the local politics of human rights. Normative systems are seldom clearly divided, but rather are plural, intertwined, and used strategically by local actors. Because of this, activists in Nima and Maamobi will likely continue to navigate between the procedures of rights and reciprocity in an effort to fulfil the human rights of the community.

Introduction

In recent decades, many human rights cities have successfully integrated human rights thinking into local practices, policies and decision making (Oomen and Baumgärtel Reference Oomen2014). These cities have attempted to address a wide range of social and public issues from a rights-based perspective. The charters of human rights cities have explicitly stipulated a list of commitments to respect and realise the rights of their populations. Among these commitments the right to water has received limited articulation. Article XXII of the World Charter for the Right to the City explicitly provides for the right to ‘permanent access to public services of potable water’. In contrast, the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City and the Global Charter Agenda of Human Rights in the City failed to refer to water as a human right.

The limited reference in human rights cities’ charters to the right to water is somewhat surprising, since access to drinking water is one of the traditional areas of cities’ responsibilities and is an issue of global concern: nearly 768 million people worldwide do not have adequate access to a source of safe water (WHO and UNICEF 2013: 8). The primary role of local government in ensuring provision of safe water for domestic uses is increasingly recognised and is reaffirmed at international events on water (UN-Habitat and UNITAR 2004; World Water Council 2009: 45–46), while local governments on numerous occasions have expressed their commitment to the right to water and the obligations it entails.Footnote ¹

The human costs of lack of access to clean water have generated a significant response from the international community, which attempts to utilise a number of initiatives and frameworks to address the issue, including sustainable development, Millennium Development Goals, human rights and good water governance. The human rights-based approach is increasingly seen as a tool that can strengthen water governance at all levels, while the vision of access to drinking water as a human right is also gaining ground within the international community.

Its application at the municipal level, though, is not without difficulty. The introduction to the current volume refers to the process of human rights commitments being ever more regularly articulated by cities; yet the human right to water awaits its conscious mainstreaming and realisation at the city level. In 2007 the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights referred to a notable gap in understanding of the ‘role, responsibilities and specific obligations of local authorities’ in relation to access to drinking water.Footnote ² Until now, the implications of the human rights-based approach to water in the urban context have been little understood in practice and in academia, although the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to water has begun to address this gap.

In response to the limited reference to the right to water by human rights cities, this chapter seeks to enhance the understanding of the implications of its realisation in the urban context. It attempts to deliver some preliminary insights into the ways in which the right is given meaning at the urban level. It addresses the status of the right as a matter of local responsibility, discussing the relevance of city action to the realisation of the right to water. Subsequently, the chapter examines the potential of domestic litigation emerging in the Global South in giving the human right to water substantive meaning in the context of urban justice.

Access to water as a city matter

Statistics show that cities have a better record of providing drinking water than do rural areas. It is estimated that 96 per cent of the world's urban population enjoys access to improved water, yet 132 million urban residents worldwide still rely on unimproved sources or surface water. Figures vary across the world, and the least water coverage is found in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 16 per cent of the urban population did not have access to an improved source in 2012.Footnote ³ Asian cities achieved nearly universal provision of water in the last few decades, having strongly invested in infrastructure development (UN-Habitat 2013: 49). However, the high level of infrastructure coverage does not guarantee adequate access to water to those connected to services. Poor quality of water supplies and regular water shortages documented in Asian, Latin American and particularly African cities indicate the deficiencies in service provision (Ibid.: 50–51). Daunting statistics on the growth of informal settlements in cities in the developing world show that slum residents are deprived of access to an improved source of water (Ibid.: 99).

It is increasingly recognised that ‘the on-going, serious and growing water crisis – to a large extent is a crisis of governance’ (World Water Assessment Programme 2006: 50). In reality the water crisis unfolds locally, where the municipal authorities deal with it at the front line. Water supply is of equal importance and relevance to city authorities in developed countries. The extent of local responsibility for different types of water services varies from country to country, while the remit of urban authorities in the provision of water supply and sanitation is substantively reinforced in the context of decentralisation (UCLG 2014). While water supply is often the direct remit of the cities’ authorities, this public function can be shared between sub-national governments at multiple levels (Hague and Harrop Reference Hague and Harrop2007: 282).

In the above context, the vision of access to water as a human right appears to be relevant and important for cities for at least two reasons. First, the normative scope and content of the right to water fits well with the cities’ remit to ensure access to water for urban residents. Second, in the context of decentralisation the realisation of the human right to water should take place in the context of urban water governance. On the one hand, city authorities can have a front line role in the implementation of the right to water. On the other, they can and often do emerge as immediate violators of the right. To elaborate on this potential, the next part of this essay attempts to illustrate the relationship between right to water standards and city action on provision of water services to its population.

Cities and the human right to water

Understanding of access to water as a human rights issue and an independent right is gaining ground within the international community. It is explicitly referred to in a number of international and regional human rights instruments.Footnote ⁴ Access to drinking water has been officially interpreted by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (UNCESCR) as an independent self-standing right in its General Comment 15.Footnote ⁵ The Committee derived the right to water from the broader scope of the right to adequate standard of living and clarified the normative content of the right and the corresponding obligations of governments. It explicitly referred to the role of municipal authorities in the implementation of the right. This section, based on the interpretation of the right to water issued by the UNCESCR in its General Comment 15, addresses the normative standards of the right whilst simultaneously illustrating their application to the cities’ actions concerning drinking water.

Domestic litigation and city action on drinking water

Davis (in this volume) explains how achieving local human rights accountability is a persistent challenge. Access to courts represents one of the core mechanisms of human rights accountability, whereas General Comment 15 reiterates that everyone should have access to effective judicial remedies for violation of their right to water.Footnote ³⁸ In practice, access to justice can be impeded by a variety of barriers, including lack of constitutional and statutory recognition of the human rights standards in national legal systems. Domestic litigation in the Global South is gradually emerging as a mechanism capable of addressing the violations of the right to water at the urban level. It illustrates the prospective development of the rights-based accountability of city authorities for inadequate provision of services, contamination of drinking water, pollution of water resources and disconnections from supply. This section discusses these developments with a view to enhancing the understanding of the potential and limitations of the judicial action to address violations of the right to water and strengthening urban justice.

Conclusion

This contribution has attempted to discuss the relevance or the human right to water standards to city action on drinking water. Limited reference to the right in the human rights cities’ charters suggests that the conscious realisation of the right to water awaits its mainstreaming into the human rights cities’ discourse and praxis. Specifically, the understanding of the legal and policy implications of the rights-based approach to governance of water services in the human rights cities appears to be in its infancy. The limited degree of recognition of the right to water in domestic legal systems might be the reason for the poor attention of the human rights cities to the right. However, as the introduction to this volume explains, the lack of formal ratification of certain human rights treaties in the domestic systems did not stop the human rights cities from taking up the commitment to realise the rights articulated in these treaties.

Domestic litigation in the Global South offers examples of the judicial interpretation of the right to water standards applied in the city contexts. These developments indicate the potential for justiciability of the right to water to be achieved in the context of urban justice, but also suggest the problematic aspects for cities. Apart from the fact that urban authorities can be effectively named human rights violators, the enforcement of judgements often entails financial considerations for the authorities in regard to reallocation of budgetary priorities. The prospective of judicial intervention should not ‘put off’ human rights cities genuinely considering mainstreaming of the right to water standards in their policy and decision making. Instead, its lessons, where available, along with the outcomes of other forms of assessment of the local human rights performance, such as those discussed in Davis (in this volume), could inform cities’ action on implementation of the right.

This chapter has offered initial thoughts regarding the process of localising the right to water and its judicial enforcement at the urban level. While the scope remains for further research on the policy implications, challenges and success factors of advancement of the right to water in urban context, one would hope that human rights cities, driven by their progressive nature and goodwill, start to consider embracing the right to water more explicitly and assertively in their human rights charters, policies and decision making. The eventual fulfilment and enjoyment of the right to water is happening locally, close to home; therefore the explicit commitment of the human rights cities to engage with this process would enhance the implementation of the right and contribute to the strengthening of urban justice.