What we are looking for mostly is delight. The struggle for democracy is a positive one, a struggle to live, to grow, to flourish. Becoming democratic unleashes our own power; it mobilizes our better angels . It should fill us with delight. (...) We cannot become democratic only by a sort of asceticism that warns us off oligarchy, heteronomy, and passivity, that slaps us on the wrist when we sin. Our primary strategy is not so much to run from oligarchy but to run toward the horizon of democracy. We must increasingly come to want, even to crave, the deep delight it offers us. We need to feed off this delight, to relish it, and to flourish by living within it.

(Purcell, 2013, pp. 157-158)

 

And if public space is just one of a vast variety of sites in the simultaneously global and local webs where the different lifestyles and cultures get configured, how does democracy get constructed? How is it possible to claim for the Right to the City?

The social theorist and geographer David Harvey enunciates:  "The city, the noted urban sociologist Robert Park once wrote, is 'man's most consistent and on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself'. If Park is correct, then the question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold. The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and reinvent the city more after our hearts' desire. (...)To claim the right to the city (...) is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way. " (Harvey, 2012, pp. 4-5) In other words, as Harvey enlightens, capitalism implies a distribution of the surpluses of the economic system through urbanization. Therefore, in order to reinvent ourselves and our urban experience and to claim the Right to the City, a greater democratic regulation over this produced surplus is needed.

 

And how to exercise a greater democratic regulation? How to exercise democracy? How should we embrace democracy nowadays? The geographer Mark Purcell defines democracy with the following words: " Democracy insists that people never agreed to surrender their power in the first place, and so achieving autonomy requires only that people discover and reassert the ruling and law-giving power that is already theirs. Despite the elaborate discourse that has grown up around it, I want to suggest that democracy is not actually all that complicated. It is simply the act of governing ourselves together in the polis. In a democratic polis, there are no states, no elections, no parties, no representatives. There are no organs of power like corporations, or churches, or unions. There is only us, each the equal of every other. We declare our intention to govern ourselves, to keep our own power for ourselves, to give the laws to   ourselves, to manage our community, our city, and our affairs for   ourselves . We refuse to be ruled by another, by the few, or by the one. We do not yet know what we can do, but we have decided to find out." (Purcell, 2013, pp. 74-75) He also states that being positively democratic would be an experience too intense and overwhelming to preserve an manage. Instead, becoming democratic, 'pushing ourselves toward the horizon of democracy', recognizing and sustaining the democratic practices that exist already in space, would be the only option. (Purcell, 2013)

 

In the middle of hard concrete tiles, of plantpots pissed by dogs - and also humans -, of bicycles and roller skaters, of hundreds of colorful and apparently useless products, of chants, dances and discourses, of wrapped facades and shiny shoes, through most of the urban practices of 'La Séptima', I dare to say, the human actors make an effort in becoming democratic. Even if in most cases of the contemporary city the Right to the City is joined by those who have the possibility of paying and enjoying the produced 'surplus' of capitalism (Harvey, 2012), the public spaces of Bogotá's main pedestrianized axis - degraded, unattended,  let free to the use of "invaders" - is constantly being created and recreated by means of the response that popular cultures give to the dominant class that manages that surplus; by means of a response that consists on claiming their right of accessing urban life, on the practice of becoming democratic, on the exercise of 'governing themselves' and attempting to give their  own rules to the efforts they make to survive. Even if all buildings were closed, even if there are sometimes armed officers that control and guard 'what happens', even if employment is denied to determined social groups, even if these social groups are commonly seen as the invaders of public spaces, they do what they do to subsist, to somehow exist in the city, to govern themselves through informality, through improvisation, through the private necessities transformed in public informality, in public happenings, in shameless practices. That is what public space is: an absolute site of potentiality, of constant innovation and invention, of catharsis and resilience. Public space is one of thousand other sites of becoming.