Over half the world's population live in cities, with our relationships, environment and daily lives shaped and formed by our urban surroundings. Yet most of us have no power over these surroundings.

In Britain rocketing house prices, gentrification and government policies like the bedroom tax are violating our right to the city.

Constant surveillance and the new anti-squatting laws have caused further erosion, setting a Big Brother culture of fear and criminalising the occupation of unused buildings at a time of rising homelessness.

We have no say about our surroundings, the social and community fabric of where we live, the natural spaces around us or future developments in our area. Cities are built by people, but not for people.

War on Want tomorrow will host a unique event looking at how people must come before profit in urban planning.

It will feature international speakers including Patricia Estrada from Nicaragua. She is part of the Movement of Working and Unemployed Women - its acronym, MEC, reflecting the name of its pioneer Maria Elena Cuadra.

Estrada has decades of experience working alongside women in the informal economy and empowering women entrepreneurs.

She joined MEC as an outreach and advocacy worker in 1998 when she was 14 years old.

Now she has extensive experience as an advocate for women's rights in the informal sector.

Estrada has expanded MEC's networks and membership, with hundreds of street vendors, market traders, domestic workers, entrepreneurs and rural workers.

She delivers training for women on issues of gender, economic literacy , budgeting, as well as human, labour, sexual and reproductive rights, and supports members as a paralegal in their defence.

The MEC was established in 1994 and today has a membership of more than 70,000 women in seven Nicaraguan regions, including factory and informal economy workers, small entrepreneurs, and rural and unemployed women.

It acts to improve life for working and jobless women in the country's poorest sectors and fights for their equality and in defence of their rights as women, workers and mothers.

The MEC's activities include:

Devising, monitoring and evaluating programmes and projects that champion a positive impact on the protection and defence of women's rights

Contributing to women's empowerment on vulnerable issues and developing their skills for independent action.

Conducting participation that reveals progress and setbacks for women's rights in different spheres of economic and social life

Promoting new practices that lead to the eradication of physical, verbal and psychological violence and sexual harassment in and outside workplaces

Enhancing the enjoyment of economic and social rights of poor women through advocating policies that promote involvement in the labour force and stimulate economic autonomy

Female leadership training in women's interests

Creating and maintaining schemes for social support to improve the economic and social conditions of women and their families

Developing and sustaining micro-credit and business programmes which benefit women and their households.

The public meeting will also feature Izzie Counihan, who will reveal how Brent council forced her family from their home into emergency accommodation. Her story is typical of thousands, at risk of depression, or even suicide, amid the current housing crisis.

Queen's Market stallholders in Newham will hit out at Borders Agency raids on black and Asian traders, but tell how they defied council plans to shrink their patch in favour of luxury housing and a supermarket.

The Right to the City event will also stage the launch of a special exhibition by award-winning photographer Tina Remiz.

Her pictures depict Zambians trying to survive as market traders and street sellers, after huge job losses following World Bank pressure brought cuts and industry sell-offs.

War on Want held a photography competition that Remiz won to land a commission to shoot pictures in Zambia.

The venue for the meeting and show, the Candid Arts Gallery in Islington, lies near the Old Red Lion pub where the revolutionary Thomas Paine is believed to have written passages for his legendary book The Rights of Man.

Other speakers will include Alison Brown, a professor of urban planning and international development at Cardiff University, Dr Stuart Hodkinson, a lecturer in critical urban geography at the University of Leeds and Dr Jeff Garmany, a lecturer based in the Brazil Institute at King's College in London.

Caroline Elliot is international programmes officer at War on Want

Free places at the event should be reserved at waronwant.org/RightToTheCity. The exhibition will run from 7-9 November.