Is Social Justice and the City still relevant? Some thoughts

ABSTRACT

This year (2023) marks the 50th anniversary of David Harvey’s Social Justice and the City. At the time of its publication, it was viewed by many as a text that revolutionized thinking in urban geography. Since then, it has been subjected to numerous reviews and critiques. Each time, its intellectual strength allowed it to maintain its place in the geography canon. This paper describes my encounters with Social Justice; how I read it in 1978 as an African American woman graduate student in geography; and how I read it now almost 50 years on. I argue that, while Social Justice of the City demonstrates Harvey’s command of an extensive body of literature, it falls short in several ways. First, in its relative silence on the role of capitalism and the capitalist agenda, it lacks the political assertiveness (aggression) that the times required. Second, it fails to acknowledge a socio spatial dialectic or the importance of sociological variables (race/ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality) in planning. Finally, as a theory, it fails to anticipate the intellectual advances in the US and geography. This paper offers a brief synthesis of the ideas in existing reviews but is primarily a personal reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Social Justice and the City
• Marxism today
• critique
• urbanism
• black geography
• feminist geography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Harvey, social justice is contingent on the social processes operating in society. Justice can (and should) move beyond the local and particular and be approached from the lens of the universal. It is not a matter of morality or eternal justice. One cannot help but wonder what Harvey would think of the growth of the reparations movement and efforts to grapple with different types of justice – distributive, procedural, retributive, and restorative.

2 The economic and political impacts of this increasing inequality include slower GDP growth, increased poverty rates, greater household debt leading to increased risk of financial crises, and, as we see happening today, heightened political polarization.

3 Marxism has been criticized for failing to consider any of the myriad factors that contribute to social inequality. Some would argue that race, gender, culture, faith, and intersectionality contribute a greater social division than class.