Urban and Regional Environments and Planning Lecture 7: City futures: Social justice and the city

1
Urban and Regional Environments and Planning
Lecture 7City futures Social justice and the
city

• Dr Steve Musson

2
Last week

• Sustainable development in context
• Growing political profile following 1987
• Roots in 1960s politics of the left?
• UK as the dirty man of Europe
• Emerging public understanding and concern
• Understanding sustainability
• Evaluating urban regeneration

3
This week

• Social justice and the city
• Pahl (1965) Whose City
• Harvey (1973) Social Justice and the City
• Understanding social justice
• Contemporary understandings
• Social justice and urban policy
• Reading exercise Justice, difference and the city

4
Whose City? (1965)

• Ray Pahl, UK based urban sociologist
• A reaction to the apparent redundancy of Chicago
  School urban ecology
• Opportunities in education, healthcare, work,
  housing depend on social and spatial constraints
• Access to resources powerfully influenced by
  managers who determine allocation

5

• Planners are expected to make our life better,
  but if they succeed they may be resented
  because people are thereby being deprived of the
  freedom to plan their lives for themselves (Pahl
  1970 188)
• The will of the community is mediated though the
  political process, so that those with the most
  power set the goals, which makes the planner
  simply the tool of the elite (Pahl 1970 192)

6
Social Justice and the City (1973)

• David Harvey, UK/USA based geographer
• Argued that geography could not remain objective
  in the face of urban poverty etc.
• Concern with the fair distribution of resources
  in urban environments
• Social justice should be an important issue for
  urban planners

7
(No Transcript)
8

• Links redistributive justice to urban planning as
  '... the distributive effects of activities
  arranged in a given spatial form and the
  redistributive effects of changes in that spatial
  form' (1973 72).
• Argues that the spatial structure of the city
  perpetuates existing inequalities the wealthier
  benefit from the advantages of better locations
  and the reverse is true of poorer people in
  disadvantaged areas
• Sees the urban system as "a giant manmade
  resource system." Its growth "involves the
  structuring and differentiation of space through
  the distribution of fixed capital investments
  (1973 309)

9
Understanding social justice

• Focus on distribution of and access to resources
  health, work, housing
• Association between unjust redistribution and
  underlying capitalist system
• Spatial and social structure of the city
  perpetuates and renders visible injustice
• Strong role for planners to overcome injustice in
  the city

10
Contemporary understandings

• Enduring issues of social and economic injustice
  in the city things havent changed much since
  1965 in some respects they got worse
• Opening out of new understandings of social
  justice and injustice in the city
• Privatisation of public space and access
• Women in public space

11
Enduring issues of injustice

• The concentration of homelessness (in spite of
  all those vacant houses), of unemployment, and,
  even more significant, of the employed poor
  (trying to live on less than 200 a week without
  benefits) are everywhere in evidence The
  inequalities of opportunities as well as of
  standards of life are growing in leaps and
  bounds (Harvey 2000 133)

12
Then and now an inner city Baltimore
neighbourhood (Harvey 1988)
13

• On one hand, cities are places of freedom and
  escape. You can come here and get away from the
  constraints of small communities On the other
  all that chaos can become a source of danger,
  vulnerability and oppression. It can close down
  the possibility of self-expression (Massey 1996
  105)

14

• Feminist critics have suggested that one of the
  reasons for womens relatively restricted access
  to a range of public spaces is because of the
  general assumption that women are in need of
  protection from the hurly-burly of the public
  arena. Womens construction as dependent on men,
  both economically and morally reduces their
  rights to freedom in public spaces (McDowell
  1999 105)

15

• One distinguished tradition centres on the public
  usage of open or shared spaces streets,
  squares, parks, cafes, libraries and malls
  Today, the call for urban public spaces has
  intensified against a background of encroaching
  privatization and urban dereliction. The
  complaint is a familiar one, with warnings
  especially from the US of the perils of gated
  communities, public surveillance and segregation
  of once communal areas (Amin and Thrift 2002 135)

16
Conclusion

• Concerns around social justice and access to
  urban space trace their roots to left-wing
  scholarship of 1960s 1970s
• Emphasis on scholarly analysis and practical
  application
• Many of the original concerns have not gone away
  rather they have intensified
• New avenues of research / concern on social
  justice and the city

17
Suggestions for further reading

• Amin, A and Thrift, N (2002) Cities reimagining
  the urban (Cambridge Polity) Chapter 6
• Allen, J, Massey, D and Pryke, M (1999)
  Unsettling cities (London Routledge) Chapter 3
• Harvey, D (2000) Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh, EUP)
  Chapter 8
• Merrifield, A and Swyngedouw, E (1996) The
  urbanisation of injustice (London Lawrence and
  Wishart) Chapters 5 and 6