Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Advocates of the need for a new approach to societal injustice in the city have
argued that these essentially ad hoc successes can be matched by many examples
of failures and have done little to prevent the increasing inequality in society, or the
general reduction in the aims and effectiveness of planning in the public interest.
For example, Harvey in his pioneering topic, Social Justice and the City (1973),
and in many subsequent works, has sought to go beyond the specific problems of
disadvantaged and has stressed the need to investigate societal explanations for the
problems. He argued that only transformative policies will promote greater redis-
tribution and more societal equality, and recently suggested in a recent work, Rebel
Cities (2013), that such policies need to be derived from the city and its social
movements. In other words, Harvey and fellow thinkers believe that affirmative
actions are only able to modify the margins of society and will never achieve the
goal of effective equality for all. This is a consequence of their view that capitalist
societies are inherently prone to inequality because only a few control the means
of production and the rewards from the creation of capitalist social value (Harvey
and Potter 2009 ), which in Piketty's ( 2014 ) view are a consequence of the fact that
wealth normally grows faster than economic output in history.
Previously Lefebvre ( 1968, 1995 ) had proposed a new inclusionary principle for
critical urban theorists, suggesting that all city inhabitants had what he called 'le
droite ¢ la ville' (the right to the city). This leads to a revived view of the importance
of creating a new civic consciousness, accepting the fact that all urban dwellers are
part of the same collective society, and need to act in the interest of all, without
losing their individual rights to deal with their lives and the changes that occur
in their neighbourhoods. Claval (1986) also argued for more progressive policies
that involved participation of the disadvantaged in decision-making, instead of only
maximizing economic utility in new development projects.
These pioneering arguments outlining the need for more effective interventionist
policies to reduce inequality and the problems of the marginalized in cities were
buttressed by recognition of the importance of three other features. One is humani-
tarian, stemming from the view that we should not allow such conditions to persist
since we are all members of the same society. Another is that increasing numbers of
studies have shown that persistent and increasing levels of poverty and inequality
have many negative social effects (Wilkinson and Picket 2009 ) and, as the Healthy
City discussion (Chap. 13) will show, leads to biological changes that increases pro-
pensity to ill-health. In addition such features stifle the investment and innovation
that leads to higher growth (Ravallion 2013 ). Another comes from what might be
called defensive reasons. This is the fear that the growth of an underclass, mired in
poverty, may give up on the host society and turn to crime or even revolution to ob-
tain the goods they require, creating an unsafe society for the majority. This justifi-
cation for interventionist policies is almost a revival of the fears of many eighteenth
and nineteenth century governments about being overthrown by the lower classes
and city mobs that was one of the reasons for the growth of progressive policies.
These attempts to identify and explain the growth of urban problems related
to the maldistribution of goods and opportunities have been complemented by the
re-emergence of interest in the more general topic of redistributive justice by a
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