Justice and Fairness in the City: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach to ‘Ordinary’ Cities

This edited collection emerged from the work of the Newcastle Fairness Commission, a civil society group that formulated justice principles to influence the policy of the Newcastle City Council. Newcastle, UK is described as an “ordinary city”, in contrast to the “global cities” like New York and Tokyo that are overrepresented in urban studies.

The book is organized into four thematic sections, showing the breadth of urban justice considerations. Section One tackles local environmental justice, understood broadly. Chapters on urban greenspace, education, transport and food examine promote the participation of diverse social groups and attention to physical and environmental inequities in these sectors. For example, the chapter on the food justice movement discusses how the prizing of local food projects can neglect inequalities related to race, class and gender. In Newcastle, for instance, experiences of charitable organizations distributing surplus food show that the quality of food available for the underserved does not always match the quantity, and may reinforce health inequities.

Section Two applies spatial justice theories to studies of how skateboarders, young people in general, and urban dwellers in general navigate the right to the city. All three chapters show how urban groups contest restrictive labelling and parcelling out of public space.

Section Three – on participation, procedural fairness and local decision making – explores perceived unfairness in urban planning. These two chapters explore abstract concepts with case studies from Newcastle: a land use planning process and a housing development for people at risk of homelessness. These show residents’ concerns about both decision-making processes and ultimate outcomes, in terms of distributing burdens and rewards appropriately.

Section Four applies social justice concerns to the life course, examining different age groups’ attitudes towards injustice. One chapter analyses older people’s hidden experiences of injustice. Another describes how English education policy faces sometimes contradictory pressures: to reduce the achievement gap between poor and wealthy students, and also to increase educational choice with measures like “free”/charter schools. A third example is fair pay policy at Newcastle University. Taking these three cases together, “they remind us that questions of justice and fairness are a pervasive feature of everyday life from our school days through working life and into older age…Once we question the justice or the inevitability of the status quo, we can develop and deploy new theories of justice…to help us imagine and justify fairer alternative social arrangements” (pages 211–212).

Further reading:

Davoudi, Simin and Elizabeth Brooks (2014), “When does unequal become unfair? Judging claims of environmental injustice”, Environment and Planning A Vol 46, pages 2686–2702, available at http://www.fondazionefeltrinelli.it/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Davoudi_Brooks_when-does-uniqueal-beacome-unfair.pdf.

Stephens, Carolyn, Marco Akerman, Sebastian Avle, Paulo Borlina Maia and Paulo Campanario (1997), “Urban equity and urban health: using existing data to understand inequalities in health and environment in Accra, Ghana and São Paulo, Brazil”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 9, No 1, pages 181–202, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095624789700900115.

Wing, Steve, Gary Grant, Merle Green and Chris Stewart (1996), “Community based collaboration for environmental justice: south-east Halifax environmental reawakening”, Environment and Urbanization Vol 8, No 2, pages 129–140, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095624789600800214.

Book note prepared by Christine Ro