What is the Point of ‘Urban Justice’?

For some time now, the philosophical reflection on the meaning of social justice has broadened its scope from the domestic realm to the global realm. Global justice theory is timely, given the process of neo-liberal globalization, a widening of the global income gap and the fact that political philosophy traditionally has been focusing on the nation-state. However, the process of globalization also developed into a different direction: it went hand in hand with devolution, urbanization and the formation of global or world cities. A number of fairly recent books written by social scientists acknowledge this by dealing with social justice on the level of a societal unit very different than the global or the national one, much closer to our life worlds and also more of less disregarded by mainstream political philosophy, namely the city. Amongst the themes discussed here are: neoliberal-capitalist displacement and dispossession, gentrification, a reliance on market processes and an obsession with economic growth, the disregarding of the rights of homeless people, lack of citizen input, lack of tax base sharing (esp. in the US), lack of affordable housing, lack of public services in certain quarters, social and ethnic segregation and so on. The recent publications in which these theme’s figure show that the city is indeed a relevant unit of social justice for political theory. The question is, however, how these themes and questions should be framed theoretically. Do these recent books show or indicate that conceptual innovation is needed here — do we need an urban theory of justice — or is it ‘simply’ a matter of applying existing theories of social justice to the urban context? Principles of justice are often designed with a reference, implicit or explicit, to a certain kind of human society. It does not make much philosophical sense to conceive of philosophical paradigms of justice as ‘fact free,’ as disembodied eternal scheme’s that can be applied endlessly to different entities (global, domestic, local). So if the scale of a city is different in relevant respects to the scale of the state, developing a conception of urban justice entails more than applying domestic schemes of justice. Many of the cited social scientists argue that we need a conception of justice for cities that is more sensitive to space than established philosophical theories of justice, such as Rawls’ theory. Henry Lefebvre’s work figures prominently here. The basic argument seems to be that the organization of space in cities is so inextricably linked to advantage and disadvantage that it becomes necessary for analytical and normative purposes to incorporate it into such a normative framework. I will examine this claim in this paper as well as the question to what extent Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’ challenges or complements current ideas of justice and citizenship.