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Klaus Philipsen
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Why the Just City?
Our cities are ground zero for the tensions, fissures, shortcomings, and successes of our society. Before the pandemic struck, cities seemed to undergo an unstoppable renaissance. Then COVID-19 brought a sharp reversal from which cities across the world have still not fully recovered. Remote work, online shopping, and food delivery services persisted, leading to a glut of office and retail space paired with an ongoing lack of housing. These ailments plague not only U.S. cities but, in varying degrees, urban areas worldwide, from Berlin and Paris to Hong Kong. The urban halo is gone, revealing in stark light the long-festering lack of equity and justice.
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Image courtesy of the Just City center in Memphis (website)
[/td]Nowhere is the growing inequity more manifest than in our large cities. Poverty, blight, and despair are displayed cheek to jowl with glitz, luxury, and opulence. The blatantly extreme disparities not only beg moral, ethical, and political questions but also threaten the political stability and prosperity of those who have so far benefited from these discrepancies. The question of the just city is critical, urgent, and timely.
As I write this, the U.S. city has once again become a political battleground, in which even the military is brought into position. Each political party accuses the other of creating the conditions under which inequity and dysfunction thrive. Cities serve as theaters for non-local disputes that draw valuable resources away from improving the lives of all their residents.
Urban protest has a long tradition, from the Boston Tea Party to the storming of the Bastille and the Civil Rights marches. It is not new that ideas about what makes a just city diverge. Historically, Sparta and Athens have duked it out, mostly not peacefully. Today, we tend to see Athens as the better model for a just city, but we must realize that neither was just by our standards. Athens proclaimed democracy yet permitted slavery; neither women, slaves, nor foreign-born individuals could vote.
Current research on the stability and advancement of societies tends to agree that greater equity and inclusion foster more stable and prosperous communities. A Baltimore community activist expressed it succinctly: "Your team can't win if half the players are not playing and stay on the bench." Rollbacks on DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives are, therefore, counterproductive, undermining both justice and prosperity. The hypothesis that inclusion and diversity promote incompetence is false because competence requires to look at a problem from various sides, even in science. Cities have traditionally served as melting pots, thus they became more liberal than their surrounding suburban or rural areas, which often uphold racially motivated homogeneity.
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The incredible unequal wealth distribution in the US
[/td]Today, eighteen of the twenty largest cities in the U.S. are governed by Democratic mayors, while only two are Republican. Both of those—Dallas and Fort Worth—have a council-manager system that grants the mayor less power. Republicans blame Democrats for many urban failures, from underperforming schools to poverty, lack of housing, crime, drug use, and homelessness.
Cities lay the groundwork for pathways to success and failure through the physical and functional living environment they present. Including metro areas, about 80% of the U.S. population lives in urbanized regions. Divides occur within these metro areas between urban and suburban, Black and White, rich and poor, east and west, etc. Physical conditions differ greatly depending on "which side of the tracks" one observes. The rift between rich and poor has increased for most of the last 50 years. In Baltimore, two adjacent zip codes can exhibit a life expectancy difference of more than a decade. This is not just blatantly unjust but tears apart the sense of community and belonging by which a functional city thrives.
Cities serve as refuges for the destitute and playgrounds for those who need the urban marketplace to spend their money. We see people camping out on sidewalks in front of high-end stores; tent cities and million dollar villas; we see the jobless hanging out on street corners, begging affluent suburban commuters for handouts. There are neighborhoods dotted with liquor stores, where goods are sold from behind bulletproof glass, and there are grocery stores as large as a football field. More affluent residents manage to live in their city without ever setting foot in in the neighborhoods of marginal and boarded-up houses and businesses.. Conversely, many carless poor never venture into tree-lined streets lined with mansions, except for Latin lawn care workers or nannies; not even the juveniles on dirt bikes dare to venture there, perceiving the risk as too high. The affluent also don't use public transit except for a very few cities such as New York. It is seen as a last resort, used by the very poor to get to far flung jobs and shops or by the homeless seeking relief from weather. Increasingly, public schools are viewed in the same light. School choice is accelerating the flight of more affluent students to private institutions to avoid absenteeism, high teacher turnover, long bus trips and classmates arriving without breakfast or any parental support. Meanwhile, private schools boast all the amenities. The "helicopter parents," clog the streets with big SUVs when they drop their kids off.
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Urban income inequality (2017 data)
[/td]The fault lines occur not only within cities but also between them. Cities such as St. Louis, Cleveland, or Baltimore shrink and struggle to maintain basic services in light of dwindling tax revenues and high poverty. Denver, Dallas, or Austin, by contrast, grow, enjoy ample revenue for extravagant parks, convention centers, and sports stadiums, yet, without resolving their internal chasms. Thus, both the rich and the poor cities remain unjust. The divide between those who do and those who don't benefit from the opportunities that cities offer with their density, large scale municipal systems for transport, education, recreation, culture and infrastructure appears to be almost universal.
What is "Just" Is Far From Being Obvious
The city is also the stage for opposing views of justice. The just city has been the topic of many books, publications and is the subject of various centers devoted to the cause, from non-profits to academia.
There is no consensus on the roots of injustice, nor is there an obvious silver bullet solution. It appears necessary to trace definitions of justice and efforts to achieve clarity. Especially the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that seems so elemental to the question of the just city has recently been placed in the crosshairs of the debate, especially by those who do not benefit from it. It is not a new idea and only the latest stage in the American project going back to egalitarian concepts in the country's founding documents. It is a continuation of 20th-century efforts such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act, affirmative action and movements for gender equity, disability rights, veterans, and immigrants.
A seminal book titled "The Just City" (from which I took the title of my inquiry) by Harvard scholar Susan Fainstein was published in 2010. She, in turn, refers to a 1971 Harvard book titled "A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls. Rawls stresses impartiality and fairness. Far from blind to historic disadvantages though, he emphasizes the disadvantaged and rejects that societal utility can justify any individual injustice. Fainstein argues that since Rawls the city has become more utilitarian in that sense that competitiveness, transactionalism and deal-making have become far more important than fairness.
Fainstein sees top-down urban renewal in terms of this neoliberal quest for competitiveness on the national and international level, often on the backs of the disadvantaged. She distilled four topics:
She finds that the relation between public and private has a lot to do with all four topics and compares four capitalist cities and how well they serve their citizens. In her view then, Amsterdam compares favorably with New York thanks to the European social democracy which buffers capitalist impulse.
Today we seem to be in a different place than Fainstein, who formed her concepts during the Vietnam protest, the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Johnson's Great Society concepts, Reagan's countermove of blaming government, and Clinton's attempts to find a middle ground buoyed by the end of the Cold War and his grand ideas of a "bridge to the 21st century". Since then the social democratic balance of Sweden, Holland and Austria etc. has unraveled in the light of international migration and the lingering shadows of European imperialism still fueling migration. Now justice has to be calibrated on a much larger scale. Still, some of Fainstein's metrics for justice may still prove viable.
Today we call the public space a "third space" but mean the same. Meanwhile privatization has progressed and further diminished the availability of those spaces in which community can unfold in not only in the US but also in Europe and Asia. Growing inequity may well be connected to the shrinkage of the public domain. Just consider how the decline of public housing coincides with the current housing crisis. The closure of public mental institutions, justified in the name of reducing government, has contributed to homelessness. The frequent privatization of formerly public services—such as electricity, gas, water, and transportation—has made them scarcer and less affordable. The increasingly intrusive technology, including ubiquitous cameras in public spaces with license plate readers and facial recognition technology, devalues public space by reducing urban anonymity. Sociologists such as George Simmel and Louis Wirth viewed anonymity as a proxy for freedom, where cities offer more of it, i.e. less social control than a village.
Fainstein also emphasizes choice as an element of a just city, arguing that choice is another proxy for freedom. The city used to be the locus for choices, but persistent urban problems after COVID have reduced them. Ever-larger chain stores, online shopping, and technology favoring the private over the public continue the trend. Information technologies were touted to increase choices, for example by allowing working from home. But they also enable watching movies from home, video chatting instead of in person meetings and altogether created digital homogeneity where there once was physical diversity. Just consider that the screens for Windows, Facebook, TikTok or smart phones look identical worldwide, notwithstanding all the cultural differences.
This privatization of the virtual and the physical world driven by profit motive, splits people with enough education and money to manage or buy access and from those who have neither. The ongoing massive concentration and monopolization in business, fuels additional reduction of choices. Privatization, profit, tightly controlled access, ubiquitous surveillance and reduced choice all make the city less just.
Planners are not innocent. In fact, many injustices are direct results of planning decisions. Fainstein's urban renewal examples may not represent the most current culprits, even though aspects of urban renewal still cause displacement. Often, the problem lies in how funds are allocated. In my hometown of Baltimore, the planning department conducted an equity analysis of several years of the city's capital budget, finding that two-thirds of investments were made in areas where less than one-third of residents were white, in a city where all residents pay twice the property taxes of their suburban counterparts. This finding led to a revamped capital budget planning process, directing public investments in street trees, parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, ADA accessibility, infrastructure repair, road paving, scooter sharing, and trash removal into burdened communities.
Market-driven private investment decisions continue to perpetuate practices akin to "redlining," where high-risk areas are flagged based on race. The result is ongoing difficulty in locating grocery stores in food deserts and attracting developers to invest in disinvested areas. Properties in these "redlined" areas are undervalued to the extent that homeowners cannot secure loans for upkeep, making decay a perpetuated cycle.
More widely understood segregation and stratification stem from how transportation projects have been planned in the context of America's shift toward making the automobile the primary mode of transport, even in large cities. The resulting freeways have created multiple injustices. The previous DOT Secretary, Buttigieg, funded urban countermeasures to address these historic injustices. However, current policies jeopardize several already awarded grants aimed at constructing measures for reconnection.
This diagnosis is startling right in the wake of all the fanfare about "the age of cities" and the many hymnals praising the city as the best thing invented ever, whose inhabitant would be the "creative class" according to Richard Florida. Instead, American cities have become less functional, a situation exacerbated by a federal administration that is anti-urban, anti-intellectual and openly hostile to "blue cities" and the entire notion of equity and inclusion.
Failure to Thrive
Opponents of the focus on Diversity, equity and inclusion ( DEI) blame the entire complicated system designed to create a more just city as ineffective and counterproductive. Attention to vulnerable communities, minorities, affirmative action, community benefits agreements, reparations and inclusion are seen as wasteful, and a distraction from basic functionality. There is no simple proof that cities with those policies more success than those without them when it comes to outcomes. Displacement, housing shortage, unabated homelessness, petty crime, failing schools, transit in poor repair, the list of grievances is endless and cuts across large cities across the political spectrum with essentially nothing that makes liberal or progressive cities stand out as successes in contrast to smaller cities (pop. 50,000-500,000) that Brookings found to be far more successful in their aim to reduce inequalities.
The just city must go beyond the surface of banner style DEI manifestations such as high affirmative action quota, large pride parades, sanctuary status, diversity festivals or arts districts in minority communities. What matters most is still that the basic services function well across all neighborhoods, including quality schools in all zip codes, clean playgrounds in each district, grocery stores that are not all concentrated in affluent areas and health care that is accessible to all. This is more challenging in larger cities than in those that are small enough for residents to be heard when they claim accountability.
Clearly, the binary choice between DEI and functionality is false, the two are not mutually exclusive. While it may obvious that it may be easier to maintain cohesion and function in smaller cities, size can't be a deciding factor, either. Occasionally there is inherent tension between various goals. The lack of enforcement around nuisance crimes, littering, drug and traffic offenses in the quest to avoid unjust incarceration is an example. Not incarcerating even more people is a worthy goal, but so is enforcment of laws that prohibit shoplifting, dirt bike riding, hold-ups, car-jacking, traffic violations and littering. Those infractions disenfranchise residents across all parts of the city by robbing them the essential sense of security. Disadvantaged communities are hit hardest and demand enforcement of the rules because the sum of those violations makes their life miserable. Democrats lost urban votes because of this. These conflicting goals blur traditional lines between the parties not only in the US.
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Dutch tractor demonstration
[/td]The Netherlands provide an example: Near Amsterdam which Fainstein rated so highly as a just city the university of Delft maintains a "Center for the Just City". With an international team of architects, urbanists, and international collaborators the center tirelessly investigates pathways to more urban justice in a place that most visitors from the US would describe as quite inclusive.
The people of the Netherlands, though, including in Amsterdam, got increasingly disenchanted with this inclusivity. The flood cannabis dispensaries, tourists, and prostitutes and other aspects of being a liberal city fueled discontent that merged with the discontent of farmers against rules against certain fertilizing practices. In 2023 thee majority of Netherlanders made the right leaning Farmers Party (BBB) the largest party in the Dutch Senate in a provincial election. Germany and France also saw the unholy fusion of urban and rural frustration, with farmers driving their tractors into capital cities as if they were tanks.
Explanations for the rise of populism are plentiful; one stands out: The aversion against inclusion, a welcome culture and the focus on minorities. Often in the guise of a fight against bureaucracy, regulations, and "wokeness" anti-equity and anti-inclusion sentiments burst into the open, sometimes in clearly racist terms. Racism and the hate of "the other" is an old phenomenon in times of economic difficulty and intentionally applied in the quest to divide the disenfranchised so they fight each other. As a result fake and real culture clashes blur the lines between left and right further.
Confusingly, left and right pursue similar objectives at times; for instance, when it comes to the goal of streamlining bureaucracy. Progressive Baltimore city council members join colleagues from around the country on bills aimed at rolling back certain housing regulations viewed as originating in privilege, which today restrict housing production. Developers, seeing additional business opportunities, agree. At times, the roles of left and right seem reversed, as seen when proponents of solar installations collide with farm preservationists, or in energy generation, where the desire for affordable energy conflicts with decarbonization efforts.
Even immigration creates confusion, as liberal urbanists protest against the deportation of neighbors alongside farmers or restaurant owners who fear losing valuable workers. Even more perplexing is when immigration hawks argue for deportation under the premise that a labor shortage will help raise wages. In all these examples, the constituents for justice reside on both sides of the issue.
Maryland's Governor Moore, the only black governor in the US, recently confused his supporters when he vetoed a bill to study reparations. Maybe to compensate he announced a few days later focused state investments in "Just Communities" that resulted from a complicated set of metrics indicating past injustices such as low homeownership, low property values, vacancies, past redlining, state imprisonment rate, proximity to superfund sites, exposure to lead paint, and asthma rates. His opponents a moment ago delighted about the veto describe the Just Communities policy as "pure socialism".
Overall though, it is safe to say that the fault lines are no longer merely urban-rural, left-right, or capitalist versus environmental protector.
What would a future Just City look like?
It becomes evident, that Jacobs' and Fainstein's rather bourgeois metrics of approaching the just city are no longer broad enough to capture the current moment; nor do they provide appropriate pathways towards a future just city. Beyond neo-liberalism, privatization and the reduction of choices technology, social media and climate change present additional challenges adding to existing national and international inequities. Populist nationalism and autocracy may be the result of inequities but they exacerbate them. Climate change, and political and economic hardships enlarge migration waves which, in turn, have destabilized previously more homogenous populations and fueled cultural identity conflicts. In many ways a self propelling sequence of cause and effect.
None of the underlying causes for injustice, conflict and tension can be solved with isolationist denial of commerce, migration, or climate change or on a national level. Certainly not on the city level. Yet, solutions on the very local level are the foundation for more trust in institutions and "the system" at large. The precise outline how a future just city could look like is still emerging. However, one assert with some confidence, that it will be more Athens than Sparta, more Jane Jacobs than Robert Moses, more Thomas Jefferson than Elon Musk, more science than myth, more human than technology. The equity challenge will not go away. As the incoming new CEO of the semi-public Baltimore Development Corporation puts it:
What does it mean on the ground? The future just city remains foremost a functional one. It has to deliver its core services in a reliable manner across all zip codes. It has to efficiently discard of waste, provide transportation, mobility, housing, energy, water, food, health care, access to jobs and public safety. This is no small feat. Some of this can be done through private companies, but as Fainstein reminds us, privatization usually means less public control. Public oversight has to guarantee fairness, equal distribution and effective delivery.
Naturally, the future just city is more than core services.
- Climate change adds resilience and sustainability to the list of "must haves" -from stormwater management to measures against urban heat islands, shelter against storms or floods.
- The pressures of global migration will require a city that can integrate newcomers and their various cultures.
- Rapidly changing technology has to be balanced with the human needs for stability and community. Preservation and change have to be carefully calibrated. The human scale has to be the guide.
- The future just city is not one of flying cars and ever taller skyscrapers. It will have to recognize that technology, despite its promises to the contrary, has caused widespread isolation and loneliness.
- A just city must foster community, offer joy, entertainment, choices in sports and culture. No place is better suited for this better than the city, which is why cities have thrived through the ages.
- Thriving places of knowledge will be needed more than ever, ranging from quantum computers to astrophysics, from neuro- to climate science, from biology to medicine. Science and research will continue to shatter long-held believes in rapid succession. Only those willing to discard old truths, and embrace experimentation, failure and retrying will be able to cope. To fortify residents in this manner, education is a must have, not so much in the form of a degree once obtained in life, as more in the shape of a continual learning process;
- A more equitable distribution of knowledge is needed but thriving centers of research will be needed more than ever whether to deal with quantum computers, astrophysics, neuro-science, climate science or biology and medicine. Science and research will continue to shatter long-held believes in rapid succession. Only those willing to discard old truths, and embrace experimentation, failure and retrying will be able to cope. To fortify residents in this manner, education is key, less in the form of a degree obtained once in life, more as continual learning; there is no better place for that a city.
- Finally AI: It is the big unknown. It is not yet clear how AI will upset those urban balances but it certainly will challenge the concept of the city further. After automation and productivity eliminated much manual labor, it seems almost certain that AI will eliminate many white collar jobs possibly further driving up inequality.
For the required flexibility and openness to happen the just city must instill trust, a sense of community, safety and security and yes, also some stability. To counterbalance the whirlwind of change, the physical setting of the city must embrace nature and provide a sense of permanence, authenticity, recognition and identity. This is the domaine of architects and planners. Relearning towards equity remains a task.
Buildings and neighborhoods should not be designed to challenge their users, and not for the short-term profits of the investors but to provide comfort, resilience and sustainability. They should be designed for adaptation instead obsolescence and demolition. In that architects can provide a contribution to justice.
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
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