This book examines how rights shape every aspect of urban life—where people live, worship, gather, work, and participate in the decisions that define their communities. Yet cities around the world continue to struggle with balancing competing rights, addressing historical injustices, and ensuring equitable planning for increasingly diverse populations.
 
This volume brings together leading international scholars to explore the evolving relationship between rights and urban planning through compelling case studies and innovative theoretical perspectives spanning multiple continents. It examines pressing issues such as housing, Indigenous rights, migration, public participation, property, religious freedom, environmental justice, homelessness, accessibility, and commercial gentrification, while introducing emerging concepts including planning rights, collective rights, the right to prosperity, and the rights of nature. Moving beyond critique, the contributors highlight practical approaches, legal innovations, and policy reforms that demonstrate how planning can become a powerful instrument for advancing justice, inclusion, and democratic governance. Bridging theory and practice, this timely collection offers planners, policymakers, scholars, students, and engaged citizens an accessible yet rigorous examination of one of the defining challenges of contemporary cities: ensuring that rights are not merely proclaimed but realized in the everyday spaces where people live their lives.
 
This book is essential reading for students, policymakers, legal scholars and human rights practitioners in urban studies, planning, geography, law, and public policy. It will also appeal to community organizers, civil society advocates, and engaged citizens interested in social justice, equitable development, and democratic governance. The volume spans multiple subject areas including urban planning and design, human rights law, environmental justice, housing policy, Indigenous studies, migration studies, and critical urban theory.
 
Most of the chapters in this book were originally published in Planning Practice & Research and are accompanied by an updated Introduction.