Searching for the Just City

Debates in Urban Theory and Practice

Peter Marcuse, James Connolly, Johannes Novy, Ingrid Olivo, Cuz Potter, Justin Steil

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135971403
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Cities are many things. Among their least appealing aspects, cities are frequently characterized by concentrations of insecurity and exploitation. Cities have also long represented promises of opportunity and liberation. Public decision-making in contemporary cities is full of conflict, and principles of justice are rarely the explicit basis for the resolution of disputes. If today's cities are full of injustices and unrealized promises, how would a Just City function? Is a Just City merely a utopia, or does it have practical relevance? This book engages with the growing debate around these questions.

The notion of the Just City emerges from philosophical discussions about what justice is combined with the intellectual history of utopias and ideal cities. The contributors to this volume, including Susan Fainstein, David Harvey and Margit Mayer articulate a conception of the Just City and then examine it from differing angles, ranging from Marxist thought to communicative theory. The arguments both develop the concept of a Just City and question it, as well as suggesting alternatives for future expansion. Explorations of the concept in practice include case studies primarily from U.S. cities, but also from Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

The authors find that a forthright call for justice in all aspects of city life, putting the question of what a Just City should be on the agenda of urban reform, can be a practical approach to solving questions of urban policy. This synthesis is provocative in a globalised world and the contributing authors bridge the gap between theoretical conceptualizations of urban justice and the reality of planning and building cities. The notion of the Just City is an empowering framework for contemporary urban actors to improve the quality of urban life and Searching for the Just City is a seminal read for practitioners, professionals, students, researchers and anyone interested in what urban futures should aim to achieve.

Part I
Why justice?

Theoretical foundations of the Just City debate

1
Planning and the Just City¹

Susan S. Fainstein

The profession of city planning was born of a vision of the good city. Its roots lie in the nineteenth-century radicalism of Ebenezer Howard and his associates, in Baron Haussmann’s conception of creative destruction, and in the more conventional ideas of the urban progressives in the United States and their technocratic European counterparts. While the three approaches differed in their orientation toward democracy, in their content, and in their distributional outcomes, they all had their start in a revulsion at the chaotic and unhealthful character of the industrial city. Their common purpose was to achieve efficiency, order, and beauty through the imposition of reason (Scott 1998).

Today planning is characterized by greater modesty. Despite some exceptions, especially the advocates for the new urbanism, most planners and academic commentators believe that visionaries should not impose their views upon the public.² Moreover, skepticism reigns over the possibility of identifying a model of a good city. Attacks on the visionary approach have come from across the ideological spectrum. The left has attacked planning for its class bias (Gans 1968; Harvey 1978), for its anti-democratic character (Davidoff and Reiner 1962; Yiftachel 1998; Purcell 2008), and for its failure to take account of difference (Thomas 1996). The right sees planning as denying freedom (Hayek 1944) and producing inefficiency (Anderson 1964); it regards markets as the appropriate allocators of urban space (Klosterman 1985). Centrists consider comprehensive planning inherently undemocratic and unattainable (Altshuler 1965; Lindblom 1959), seeing the modernists’ efforts to redesign cities as destructive of the urban fabric and indifferent to people’s comfort and desires (Jacobs 1961; Hall 2002). Indeed the history of planning practice seems to validate the critics: postwar American urban renewal and highway building programs resulted in displacement and the break-up of communities, while European social housing development frequently produced unattractive, socially homogeneous projects. Now, the emphasis on economic competitiveness that tops every city’s list of objectives causes planning to give priority to growth at the expense of all other values, providing additional evidence to the critics who see it as serving developer interests at the expense of everyone else.

Still, despite the theoretical critique, practical difficulties of implementation, and inequitable outcomes so far, the progressive/leftist ideal of using planning to create a revitalized, cosmopolitan, just, and democratic city remains. Even while this vision seems forever chimerical, it continues as a latent ideal, bold in its scope but less rigid than its predecessors in regard to its general applicability. Frequently its content is assumed to be self-evident, but it is the measure against which practice is found wanting. Much of the critical planning literature, while attacking planning in practice, takes for granted that we know good and bad when we see it, freeing us from making elaborate arguments to justify our criteria. But using this critique implies that planning could do otherwise. In particular, the meaning of justice, which is not the only component of a good city but certainly one of the principal and perhaps most often transgressed elements, calls for sustained discussion. Only recently has there been a move to develop principles of justice applicable to planning that at the same time recognizes the situational nature of ethical judgment:

The just is not determined by an algorithm, particularly with respect to a situated activity such as planning. There is always scope for discretion, which in turn emphasizes that practical reasoning is essentially about judgment … It is about negotiating a path between the universal and the particular, leading to action.

(Campbell 2006:102)

This effort to describe the path between the universal and the particular is yet in a fledgling state. The purpose of this chapter is to move the discussion along. My focus is on justice and its relationship to democracy and diversity. These are elements of a theory of the good city, but a more encompassing discussion would also have to take into account a broader set of values, including desirable physical form, environmental protection, and authenticity. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of the discussion here.

THE CITY AS A SITE OF JUSTICE

The question of whether to pay particular attention to “the city” (or metropolitan area) needs discussion. Why not the region, the nation, the world? Paul Peterson (1981), in his book City Limits, contends that while city administrations can foster economic growth, they cannot engage in redistribution without precipitating capital flight, unemployment, and a decreasing tax base. Manuel Castells (1977) conversely asserts that cities are not the sources of production—that this is a regional function. If this is the case, and if production is key to the formation of economic interests, restricting analysis to cities or even metro areas is useless. In combination, Peterson and Castells could be interpreted as showing the irrelevance of the metropolitan level.

To be sure cities cannot be viewed in isolation; they are within networks of governmental institutions and capital flows. Robert Dahl, in a classic 1967 article, referred to the Chinese box problem of participation and power: at the level of the neighborhood, there is the greatest opportunity for democracy but the least amount of power; as we scale up the amount of decision-making power increases, but the potential of people to affect outcomes diminishes. The city level therefore is one layer in the hierarchy of governance. But the variation that exists among cities within the same country in relation to values like tolerance, quality of public services, availability of affordable housing, segregation/integration, points to a degree of autonomy. Justice is not achievable at the urban level without support from other levels, but discussion of urban programs requires a concept of justice relevant to what is within city government’s power and in terms of the goals of urban movements (Fainstein and Hirst 1995; Purcell 2008: ch. 3). Moreover, there are particular policy areas in which municipalities have considerable discretion and thus the power to distribute benefits and cause harm; these include urban redevelopment, racial and ethnic relations, open space planning, and service delivery. Castells (1983), while minimizing cities’ role in production, regards them as the locus of collective consumption—i.e., the place in which citizens can acquire collective goods that make up for deficiencies in the returns to their labor. Consequently he contends that urban social movements can potentially produce a municipal revolution even if they cannot achieve wider social transformation. According to this logic, then, urban movements do have some transformative potential despite being limited to achieving change only at the level in which they are operating.

In my attempt to develop criteria for a Just City, I first present an example of urban injustice then discuss the ways in which philosophers approach the value questions embedded within it. I then examine more generally the issues arising from various value criteria and their applicability to urban issues. The thoughts presented here represent the beginning of a larger project in which I attempt to develop an urban vision that can frame goals for urban development without being vulnerable to charges of moral absolutism.

AN EXAMPLE: THE BRONX TERMINAL MARKET

The story of a recent New York City planning decision with which I was peripherally involved as an advocate planner bears on the first three of the abovementioned policy areas (urban redevelopment, racial and ethnic relations, open space planning). It concerns the eviction of the wholesale food merchants at the Bronx Terminal Market, who were forced to leave their premises so that the market site could be turned over to a development firm. The market, which lies on city-owned land directly beneath the Major Deegan Expressway, opened in the 1920s and was renovated and reopened with considerable fanfare by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1935. Several of the last remaining firms could trace their origins back to those early days.

Figure 1.1 The Bronx Terminal Market

Reflecting the city’s ethnic diversity, the merchants sold their exotic produce, meats, and canned goods primarily to bodegas, African food stores, and other specialized retailers.The city leased the market to a private firm, which collected rents and managed the facility. During the last few decades its neglect had resulted in decrepit structures, potholed roadways, inadequate services, grim interiors, and filthy surroundings. Those merchants who hung on to the end had suffered from the failure of the market’s manager to maintain the property. Yet as late as 2005, 23 remaining wholesalers (down from an original peak of nearly 100) and their 400 employees were still generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

In February 2006 the New York City Council approved the re-zoning of the market site from industrial to retail. The eight existing buildings, some of which had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, would be torn down. The chairman of the Related Companies, which bought the market lease from the previous leaseholder, was a close friend of the city’s deputy mayor for economic development. His firm intended to build a million-square-foot, suburban-style retail mall, to be called the Gateway Center at Bronx Terminal Market. It was to house a big-box retailer and a standard array of chain stores. Part of the project’s financing depended on city and state subsidies, and the plans had to be approved by locally elected public officials, but no meaningful give and take ever took place between the merchants’ association and city government. The Related Companies’ glowing presentation of the project’s putative benefits was never seriously challenged by any public official. Although the Bronx borough president, members of the community board, and city council members expressed sympathy for the plight of the merchants, who had endured decades of mistreatment, their sentiments did not move them to stand in the way of the juggernaut that was pushing the project. The treatment of the market comprises one more example of the priority given to economic development by city officials and the deployment of the utilitarian argument that decision rules should be based on the (alleged) greatest good of the greatest number.

The market merchants fought their displacement in court and before various city forums, including the local community board, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council. Sadly, however, the merchants lacked sufficient political influence to sway these officials either into willingness to integrate them into the Gateway project or to supply them with a suitable relocation site. By and large officials accepted the logic that the new mall represented necessary modernization and adaptation to the service economy.

Consultants to the market merchants proposed developing an integrated wholesale and retail market similar to the successful Pike Place Market in Seattle or New York’s own Chelsea Market. Construction of a combined wholesale-retail facility would have differentiated the enterprise from cookie-cutter malls around the country, exploited its urban setting, and retained existing jobs. Use of a vacant city-owned site to the south of the market as well as a northern piece could have increased the area available for wholesale uses, but the city wished to reserve these areas for parkland as part of a swap for McComb’s Dam Park, which it had designated as the location of a new Yankee Stadium (see note 8 below). The developer of the shopping mall was pre-selected without a public request for proposals or the opportunity for anyone to suggest other development strategies. Representatives of the city argued that since the developer bought the lease directly from the previous operator of the market, it was a purely private deal and therefore required no competitive bidding. Even though the city owned the land and leased the market buildings to a manager who had neglected them for years, the leaseholder was nevertheless allowed to sell his interest without constraints or effort by the city to buy back the lease itself. The city excluded affected residents and businesses from participating in planning for the area, limiting their input to reacting to the already formulated plan. The developer provided the neighborhood with at best minor concessions in the form of a community benefits agreement. Hundreds of well-paying jobs, almost all held by adult male immigrants, could be lost, replaced primarily by part-time, low-paid employment, and a once vital and viable business cluster was to be destroyed.³

A legal process was followed, as determined by judicial decisions, hearings were held, and the deal was carried out with the approval of the community board, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council. If evaluated by conformity to proper procedures, as prescribed by the city’s land use review process, the outcome cannot be faulted. Decision-making occurred entirely at the local level, with no involvement of either the state or the federal government.⁴ One could argue that structural forces (a changing economy, the need to compete) constrained decision-making. But the cases could have been decided differently and benefits could have been more equitably distributed.

The justification for the project primarily stems from its economic contribution rather than any physical improvements it will contribute to the area. One of the claims of the Gateway Center’s developer is that the impoverished residents of the South Bronx crave the opportunity to shop at deep-discount stores. This is probably true, as New York has seen rising poverty and a declining median income since 1990. Residents are caught in a vicious circle: they cannot afford to patronize independent shopkeepers because their wages are so low, and their wages are so low because large corporations have been able to force down the general wage rate, justifying their stinginess as required by competition. The introduction of a big box store into this part of the Bronx will create more poorly paid employees who can only manage to patronize businesses that pay exploitative wages.

One’s immediate reaction to this story is that injustice was done. The benefits of the project accrued to a wealthy developer and nationally owned chain stores. There was discrimination against small, independently owned businesses that were based in minority ethnic groups. Open space planning was conducted in a way intended to assist the New York Yankees rather than local residents. Can we demonstrate that these outcomes were unjust, and if so, by what criteria?

PROGRESSIVE VALUES

For the most part, empirical analysis, policy development, and theoretical formulation have proceeded on separate tracks.⁵ Thus, my story of the Bronx Terminal Market resembles numerous other case studies in the urban literature that describe redevelopment projects and trace their outcomes to the power of the pro-growth coalition or the urban régime (Mollenkopf 1983; Logan and Molotch 1987; Fainstein and Fainstein 1986). They rarely, however, propose alternative policies. I can, however, list values that urbanists generally regard as goods and bads:

1. public space
   1. bad: lack of access, homogeneity
   2. good: heterogeneity
2. planning
   1. bad: rule of experts
   2. good: citizen participation
3. distribution of benefits
   1. bad: favors the already well-to-do
   2. good: redistributes to the worst-off
   3. ambiguous: assists the middle class
4. community
   1. bad: homogeneity
   2. good: recognition of “the other”; diversity⁶

While widely accepted, these criteria are rarely problematized or carefully justified.⁷

PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES

Philosophers, in contrast to urban scholars, spend their time developing and elaborating their ideas concerning justice. Their scrutiny, however, is rarely directed to urban issues, and their development of value criteria does not usually spell out appropriate urban policy.⁸ Contemporary discussions of justice within philosophy nevertheless do concern themselves with questions that are also of central importance to urbanists and can therefore be extended to evaluating urban policy. Foremost are the questions of equality, democracy, and difference.

The work of John Rawls (1971) constitutes the usual foundation for discussions of justice and its relation to equality. As is well known, Rawls begins by positing an original position where individuals, behind a veil of ignorance, do not know their status in whatever society to which they will belong. Rawls’ first principle is liberty and his second, subsidiary principle is “difference,” by which he means equality...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Finding justice in the city
• PART I Why justice? Theoretical foundations of the Just City debate
• PART II What are the limits of the Just City? Expanding the debate
• Part III How do we realize Just Cities? From debate to action