Abstract
Susan Fainstein has made a meaningful mark on the intellectual field of planning over the course of her career as a steady advocate for the primacy of social justice in planning. Through her many articles, essays, and speeches, she has articulated a substantive definition of social justice as a critical rationale for planning. This book is a culmination of many of her deliberations on the subject, integrating both her theoretical musings and empirical research to present a case for the “just city.”
Much of the impetus of her work is rooted in the fact that over the past three decades, deindustrialization and globalization drastically changed the world we live in, creating ruptures and inequalities in urban life on a scale never seen before in late modern industrialized cities. She focuses on the problems of urban regimes and their narrow preoccupation with economic growth in the name of the “greater good.” As one of a generation of progressive scholars who emerged during and following the social movements of the 1960s, Susan Fainstein has been a consistent critic of the failures of unbridled capitalism, while urging scholars to develop an alternative model of a city guided by principles of justice and equality.
The stated aim of her book is “to develop an urban theory of justice and to use it to evaluate existing and potential institutions and programs” (p. 5). She defines the just city as “a city in which public investment and regulation would produce equitable outcomes rather than support those already well off” (p. 3). She names the three dimensions of justice as democracy, equity, and diversity and limits the scope of her analysis to capitalist urbanization in wealthy, formally democratic, Western countries. While her critique is firmly steeped in political economy, she believes that “the system will change incrementally as a consequence of continued pressure for justice.”
She intentionally stops short of prescribing a broader theory of justice and instead offers a normative framework of the just city as a guide for policy makers to use as an evaluative criterion in their decision making. She critiques urban institutions and policies in three cities: New York, London, and Amsterdam. By comparing their political regimes and development outcomes, she places them on a spectrum along indicators, such as equitable material distribution and degree of social integration. For instance, she finds New York to be the least successful on the former but relatively more successful on the latter. While many decisions affecting measures of equity, democracy, and diversity occur at the national or regional scale, local municipalities have a say in determining how public investments are directed and where objects of investments are located for urban redevelopment, housing, zoning, services, race relations, public space, and other social and physical infrastructure decisions.
The importance of justice cannot be taken for granted. This is where The Just City makes its greatest contribution. In a time during which industrialized nations are seeing a dramatic backslide in income and wealth equality, the call for the primacy of social justice in planning is a critical one. And as those who control vast amounts of wealth are funding and shaping major political campaigns, the call for social justice in planning speaks to the future of our democratic principles. Fainstein acknowledges the importance of other rationales for planning, such as efficiency and economic growth, but argues that justice should be the first principle by which to evaluate planning and policy.
But what exactly is “justice”? And how can it be operationalized as a criterion for decision making toward the just city? Fainstein presents her philosophical approach regarding democracy, equity, and diversity. Concerning the first, she contrasts her view of democracy to that of communicative action theorists who, based heavily on Habermasian communicative action theory, emphasize the discursive process as the primary arena for change. Communicative planning has gained currency in planning thought over the past two decades. Fainstein cautions against a narrow concern over the discursive process stating, “words will not prevail if unsupported by a social force carrying with it a threat of disruption” and “an intervening stage of mobilization is required between the formulation of ideas and social action” (p. 33). She underscores the fact that many of the most dramatic institutional transformations leading to greater equality and inclusivity were a result of social movements and related court or executive decisions, “not simply people reasoning together” (p. 33).
On the criterion of equity, Fainstein selects a construct consistent with liberal political theory and Rawlsian concepts as well as with neo-Marxist theory that “refers to a distribution of both material and nonmaterial benefits derived from public policy that does not favor those who are already better off at the beginning” (p. 36). This criterion would favor choices that are economically, politically, socially, and spatially redistributive. She avoids utilitarian equity by adopting Rawl’s difference principle that takes into greater consideration cultural diversity, communal values, and historical context in calculating the potential effects of policies. While she finds distributional equity consistent with Marxian thought, she acknowledges those like David Harvey who focus on the need to restructure social relations to the means of production rather than on distributional issues. Here, she stretches Marxist theory to suggest that class conflict has spilled over into the realm of state and local planning, manifesting in allocative contests over who gets what in the public realm.
Fainstein includes diversity as a third criterion, arguing that justice should not solely be measured by fair distribution but also by the allowance of social differentiation without exclusion. This stance speaks to postmodern critics of liberal and Marxist theories of justice who remind us of the multiple bases for social differentiation, including ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and culture. The inclusion of diversity as a criterion is a rejection of assimilationist models of democratic development, and it recognizes that individuals are rooted in ethnic, gender, familial, and other relations that shape culture, collective identity, and obligatory ties. It is also a rejection of economic inequality as the overarching form of subordination, giving equal weight to issues of social inclusion and equal recognition.
She recognizes some of the ways in which democracy, equity, and diversity can sit in tension and sometimes in contradiction with one another. For example, a decision arising from a seemingly democratic urban populist movement may not necessarily bode well for a minority population. Conversely, recognition of minority groups can give rise to a type of coalition politics that may exclude yet other groups. She admits that there is no remedy to these tensions, but “we can start with them as broadly applicable norms and attempt to spell them out as appropriate to particular circumstances” (p. 54). She points to the capabilities approach, as originally presented by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, as a way to devise guidelines for the evaluation of urban policy. A capabilities approach sees outcomes according to what people have the opportunity to do, given a policy or programmatic decision.
In describing the history of urban policy in the cities of London, New York, and Amsterdam, particularly with regard to housing and redevelopment, Fainstein illustrates how planners can utilize these criteria to evaluate the extent to which they contributed (or not) to a more (or less) just city. She compares different approaches to urban policy and development across different countries and political contexts and links them to outcomes in terms of democracy, equity, and diversity using various measures, such as income distribution, residential segregation, economic growth, affordable housing stock, population relocation, and political participation.
From these cases, she begins to present a set of “Principles to Guide Planning and Policy.” However, what follows unfortunately falls short of what is prefaced. For each of the three dimensions of the just city—democracy, equity, and diversity—she presents instead short lists of policy directives. While this is helpful to gain an understanding of what she considers “just” policy, she fails to present any set of “principles” prior to ratcheting down to the level of specific policies. By failing to articulate the meaning of the just city at the more abstract level of principles, she misses an opportunity to present a set of guidelines that could be applied across a broader range of city contexts and a wider array of substantive policy areas than what is described in the case studies. Applied to a wider array of cities, the lists of specific policy directives are clearly incomplete and, hence, less useful for planners as a general guide.
Overall, there is no discounting the contribution Fainstein makes in articulating the importance of social justice as a desired outcome and rationale for planning. She also presents a strong rebuttal to communicative action theorists as to why outcomes matter, why talk alone is cheap, and the danger of dwelling on microscale processes without enough regard for contextual factors, the “field of forces,” and structural constraints that delimit the scope of the debate in the first place. She is prudent in asking us to refocus planning theory on the following questions: What is the relationship between the urban context and planning activity? How does planning affect city users, including residents, commuters, and visitors? and What principles should guide plan formulation, content, and implementation?
But the book also leaves a good many questions about the issue of democracy and the role of citizen participation. Her philosophical discussion of democracy focused more on her critique of communicative action theory and less on her own ideas as to how participation in planning within a market economy can be made more democratic. What she does present is somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, she argues that citizen participation in no way guarantees just outcomes, just as public deliberation between contesting parties rarely takes place on an equal playing field in a capitalist political economy. On the other hand, she believes that incremental change toward a just city can be made through citizen participation in planning processes, using participation and the structure of participation as indicators for democracy. She implies support for policy decisions that support progressive social movements, given the constraints of democracy in an inherently unequal polity. However, it remains unclear as to what a more democratic process might look like and how one could evaluate democracy in relation to outcomes without falling into a tautological trap (i.e. participation with just outcomes equals democracy vs participation without just outcomes equals lack of democracy). This is where, she may be juxtaposing herself too squarely with communicative action theorists and foregoing the opportunity to combine macro- and microlevel processes into a more holistic framework for analysis.
Finally, there are issues raised in the case studies concerning the tensions between democracy, equity, and diversity that beg for more attention than what is allowed. In the Amsterdam case, for example, the Dutch system of “pillarization,” whereby allocation of funds for many services channeled through religious, philanthropic, cultural, and political groups is credited for the low level of spatial class segregation, since solidarity within each group appears to ensure that each “pillar” takes care of their own less privileged. But then how are funds allocated across “pillars?” And what is the character of deliberation across “pillared” groups and their effects on broader social relations? Given criticisms of identity politics as potentially exclusionary or “balkanizing,” under what conditions can such systems of allocation actually facilitate intergroup relations in such a way as to accommodate competing ideas of what is just?
These are complex issues that are difficult to adequately address through relatively short comparative case studies. However, if one is looking for a well-articulated argument for the idea of the just city, this book provides it. If one is looking for concepts to define the meaning of the just city, this book provides a strong foundation. If one is looking for a normative framework as a guide to evaluate existing and potential policies, there is more work that is needed in order to be able to operationalize the concepts to thoughtfully address the many tensions, contradictions, and historically and contextually specific issues and questions that will certainly arise.