Political, practical and architectural notion of the concept of the right to the city in neighbourhood regeneration

Informed by Henry Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city, this article discusses the issues of neighbourhood regeneration in two Finnish suburban residential neighbourhoods. The selected neighbourhoods represent relatively poor suburban areas with a high percentage of ethnic minority populations. The intention is to disclose some of the problems and potentials for participatory planning and design practices in these areas – processes that could carry out the ideals of the right to the city in urban regeneration – and to suggest that for this purpose, an interdisciplinary understanding of the relevance of current population changes in urban environment is needed.