Justice has always been a major topic within political philosophy, but scholars in the behavioural sciences have largely avoided normative statements. After the urban uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s, however, leftist scholars adopted a critical approach that, while not specifying a concept of justice, injected a moral dimension into their work. Within urban studies, the argument of Henri Lefebvre, who defined space as a social construction and who maintained that all groups should have a ‘right to the city’, became particularly influential. During the 1990s, scholars began to be more explicit about the concept of justice. Three main approaches to urban justice were developed: (1) communicative rationality; (2) recognition of diversity; (3) the just city/spatial justice. Differences between the communicative and just city approaches revolved around emphasis on democracy versus equity, process versus outcome. I argue that democracy, diversity, and equity are the three governing principles for urban justice...

The Just City

New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on t...

Towards a new epistemology of the urban

The author examines three approaches to planning theory: the communicative model, the new urbanism, and the just city. The first type emphasizes the planner’s role in mediating among “stakeholders,” the second paints a physical picture of a desirable planned city, and the third presents a model of spatial relations based on equity. Differences among the types reflect an enduring tension between a focus on the planning process and an emphasis on desirable outcomes. The author defends the continued use of the just-city model and a modified form of the political economy mode of analysis that underlies it.

New Directions in Planning Theory

Displacement has been at the centre of heated analytical and political debates over gentrification and urban change for almost 40 years. A new generation of quantitative research has provided new evidence of the limited (and sometimes counter-intuitive) extent of displacement, supporting broader theoretical and political arguments favouring mixed-income redevelopment and other forms of gentrification. This paper offers a critical challenge to this interpretation, drawing on evidence from a mixed-methods study of gentrification and displacement in New York City. Quantitative analysis of the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey indicates that displacement is a limited yet crucial indicator of the deepening class polarisation of urban housing markets; moreover, the main buffers against gentrification-induced displacement of the poor (public housing and rent regulation) are precisely those kinds of market interventions that are being challenged by advocates of gentrification and dismantled by policy-maker...

The Right to Stay Put, Revisited: Gentrification and Resistance to Displacement in New York City:

This article examines the distribution of parks in Baltimore, Maryland, as an environmental justice issue. In addition to established methods for measuring distribution of and access to parks, we employ a novel park service area approach that uses Thiessen polygons and dasymetric reapportioning of census data to measure potential park congestion as an equity outcome measure. We find that a higher proportion of African Americans have access to parks within walking distance, defined as 400 meters or less, than whites, but whites have access to more acreage of parks within walking distance than blacks. A needs-based assessment shows that areas with the highest need have the best access to parks but also have access to less acreage of parks compared to low-need areas. Park service areas that are predominantly black have higher park congestion than areas that are predominantly white, although differences are less apparent at the city level than at the metropolitan level. Following Iris Young and others, we arg...

https://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/jrnl/2009/nrs_2009_boone_001.pdf

Parks and people: an environmental justice inquiry in Baltimore, Maryland.

Philosopher, sociologist and urban theorist, Henri Lefebvre is one of the great social theorists of the twentieth century. This accessible and innovative introduction to the work of Lefebvre combines biography and theory in a critical assessment of the dynamics of Lefebvre's character, thought, and times. Exploring key Lefebvrian concepts, Andy Merrifield demonstrates the evolution of Lefebvre's philosophy, while stressing the way his long and adventurous life of ideas and political engagement live on as an enduring and inspiring interrelated whole.

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction

Written by David Harvey 20 years ago, "Social Justice and the City" linked power and justice in the geographical field, and it had an influence in many related disciplines. But during the two decades since its publication, great changes have taken place in political and urban life. Urban areas are now characterized by the omnipresence of the homeless, by huge disparities in wealth, by a growing underclass and by the exponential increase in people suffering from the effects of AIDS and hard drug use. The contributors are from both sides of the Atlantic, including Harvey himself, they analyze these changes and reconsider the character of urbanism and social justice. They push for an intellectual agenda that rallies around the development of socially just urban practices. The contributors include: Marshall Berman on rap and social justice in America; Doreen Massey on space and identity tensions in the city; and Edward Soja on social justice and the new cultural politics.

The urbanization of injustice

"Metromarxism" discusses Marxism's relationship with the city from the 1850s to the present by way of biographical chapters on figures from the Marxist tradition, including Marx, Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, and David Harvey. Each chapter combines interesting biographical anecdotes with an accessible analysis of each individual's contribution to an always-transforming Marxist theory of the city. He suggests that the interplay between the city as center of economic and social life and its potential for progressive change generated a major corpus of work. That work has been key in advancing progressive political and social transformations.

Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City

Preface: Neo-Haussmannization and Its Discontents 1. Whither Urban Studies? 2. Old Urban Questions Revisited (and Reconstituted) 3. Cities Under Tension 4. Strategic Embellishment and Urban Civil War 5. Sentimental Urban Education 6. Urban Jacobinism 7. Old Discourse on New Inequality 8. Every Revolution has Its Agora 9. Taking Back Urban Politics 10. Whose City? The Parasites', of course... Afterword: The Parasitic Mode of Urbanization Notes Index

The New Urban Question

The Politics of the Encounter is a spirited interrogation of the city as a site of both theoretical inquiry and global social struggle. The city, writes Andy Merrifield, remains "important, virtually and materially, for progressive politics." And yet, he notes, more than forty years have passed since Henri Lefebvre advanced the powerful ideas that still undergird much of our thinking about urbanisation and urban society. Merrifield rethinks the city in light of the vast changes to our planet since 1970, when Lefebvre's seminal Urban Revolution was first published. At the same time, he expands on Lefebvre's notion of "the right to the city," which was first conceived in the wake of the 1968 student uprising in Paris. We need to think less of cities as "entities with borders and clear demarcations between what's inside and what's outside" and emphasise instead the effects of "planetary urbanisation," a concept of Lefebvre's that Merrifield makes relevant for the ways we now experience the urban. The city--from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street--seems to be the critical zone in which a new social protest is unfolding, yet dissenters' aspirations are transcending the scale of the city physically and philosophically. Consequently, we must shift our perspective from "the right to the city" to "the politics of the encounter," says Merrifield. We must ask how revolutionary crowds form, where they draw their energies from, what kind of spaces they occur in--and what kind of new spaces they produce.

Andy Merrifield

Papers

Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction

The urbanization of injustice

Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City

The New Urban Question

The Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under Planetary Urbanization