“The Owners of the Street”: violence against LGBTQIAPN+ individuals and power relations in access to the right to the city

Abstract

This theoretical essay conceives the city as a socio-spatial artifact shaped by power relations, dominant ideologies, and capital accumulation. Drawing on critical urban geography and critical human rights theory, it examines how heteronormativity is inscribed into urban space, thereby denying the Right to the City to marginalized populations, particularly LGBTQIAPN+ individuals. The phenomenon of the “closet-city” is discussed as an ideologically and spatially structured model of domination in which violence against dissident sexualities is structural rather than circumstantial. The capitalist production of urban space unequally distributes the burdens of urbanization, establishing an abyssal line that separates the “owners of the street” from invisibilized subjects. State omission, the absence of public policies, and systematic impunity constitute a genocidal project of identity erasure. The study concludes that the realization of the Right to the City requires overcoming hegemonic heteronormative logics and constructing a socio-spatial democracy grounded in human dignity and in the full exercise of citizenship through the occupation of urban spaces.