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Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism   From time immemorial there have been human beings who have believed that they could construct, individually or collectively, a better world for themselves than that which they had inherited Quite a lot of them also came to believe that in the course of so doing it might be possible to remake themselves as different if not better people I count myself among those who believe in both these propositions In Rebel Cities, for example, I argued that ‘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, I wrote, is ‘far more than a right of individual or group access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change and re-invent the city more after our heart’s desire The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights’[1] Perhaps for this intuitive reason, the city has been the focus throughout its history of an immense outpouring of utopian desires for happier futures and less alienating times   The belief that we can through conscious thought and action change both the world we live in and ourselves for the better defines a humanist tradition The secular version of this tradition overlaps with and has often been inspired by religious teachings on dignity, tolerance, compassion, love and respect for others Humanism, both religious and secular, is a world view that measures its achievements in terms of the liberation of human potentialities, capacities and powers It subscribes to the Aristotelian vision of the uninhibited flourishing of individuals and the construction of ‘the good life’ Or, as one contemporary renaissance man, Peter Buffett defines it, a world which guarantees to individuals ‘the true flourishing of