Definition of Architecture

Today I found a very nice definition of architecture by David Harvey in Spaces of Hope (2000):

"The architect has been most deeply enmeshed throughout history in the production and pursuit of utopian ideals (particularly through not solely those spatial form). The architect shapes spaces so as to give them social utility as well as human and aesthetic/symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities. The architect struggles to open spaces for new possibilities, for future forms of social lives."

Harvey, David, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 200.

First sketch about building public space to claim ‘The Right to the City’.

It is the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) who wrote about ‘The Right to the City’ for the first time. How this theme is elaborated in his writings I have to investigate further but it is the geographer David Harvey who also used this as a subject in his writings. In his essay ‘The Right to the City’ (2008) he writes: ‘The right to the city is far more that the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the process of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of human rights.’ What sometimes annoys me a bit is the lack of practical examples in these theories. Maybe its up to the architect the come up with these ideas. Maybe the it is especially the architect who can function between the theory and the ‘build practice’. Let’s give it a try:
I am really wondering whether it is possible to give people in autoconstructed neighborhoods the possibility the construct their own ‘res publica’, something like a number of buildings that provide public space. This process could work into two directions: first: the process of making should be a process of community, and second: afterwards there is the ‘artifact’ that represents a common achievement and that is of common use. By doing so it is possible people to, literally, reclaim ‘the right to city’, by building it. The question however, what is the role of the architect in this? And, isn’t this a bit too idealistic?
I have to work on this idea.