Progress Towards Just Cities - Theme Cities: Solutions for Urban Problems - page 83

have gained sufficient support for implementation in the current American political
climate. So the Alliance remains a minority pressure group at the present. Yet its
regular meetings and a web site that calls for members to join in building this
movement does help explicitly identify many problems faced by the disadvantaged
people. This in itself is progress, and provides a basis for information, debate and
action, for many of the issues must to be solved if greater urban justice is to be
achieved.

3﻽5 Guides for Just Decision-Making

The identification of the various principles outlined in the previous section has fo-
cused attention on key issues that need to be addressed to create greater justice
in the city. However, the problem of most of these approaches is that they do not
always provide rationales for the various principles, or rights that are demanded,
which would help gain the support of the population at large. More importantly,
they fail to provide specific policy guidance on how to achieve the ends required,
namely to resolve, or at least mitigate, the problems or injustices felt by the disad-
vantaged in cities, which does not only include the poorest people. These issues led
Fainstein ( 2010 ) to suggest a more policy-focused affirmative approach within the
current system of global capitalism, adopting Rawls's rationale ( 1971 ) for 'fair-
ness' as the basic value upon which redistributive justice should be based, although
noting it has strong links with the liberal philosophies of natural rights proposed
by many Enlightenment writers. In her topic The Just City , Fainstein ( 2010 ) dis-
cussed the extent to which recent planning policies in London, Amsterdam and New
York have adhered to the standard of fairness. Instead of only using these empirical
examples to make her point about the extent to which they have helped progress
towards a more Just City, she generalised her ideas by suggesting that there are
three basic values of urban justice, namely, equity, democracy , and diversity , and
all need to be maximized to achieve greater fairness within cities. Within each of
these categories she provided succinct examples of policy areas that could be used
to promote greater fairness, with the intent of resolving existing 'injustices' at a city
scale, effectively creating a set of just city policy guides (Table 3.3 ).
Fainstein was careful to identify several caveats that circumscribe her approach.
For example, she emphasized that her approach is affirmative, in the sense that it
represents an incremental, not any type of transformative approach to reduce levels
of injustice (Harvey 1989 , 2013 ), although presumably many of the examples could
be part of this revolutionary process. In addition, she accepts that decisions in one
category may sometimes conflict with others, leading to the need for resolution be-
tween them. Another restriction is that the approach is designed to apply only to cit-
ies in states with a dominantly market economy and with a political tradition based
on liberal democratic principles that has also embraced egalitarianism, some of the
key issues in the capabilities approach. Finally, she accepts that these components
are only part of the range of problems facing contemporary cities, so she explicitly