This volume documents research illustrating public dissents and interventions to injustice in modern-day cities. Authors present everyday occurrences of city life and place making; still, they show how the ordinary city grows from historical dimensions of injustice, violence and fear. Yet, ordinary citizens continue to make the city their own, to contribute to the creation of city structures and to contest those practices of spatial demarcation, which limit rather than uplift their everyday social livelihood. Chapters show how marginalized populations, from racial, to gendered, to the working poor, are part of the apparatus that makes the city function. However, their contributions to city arrangement and endurance are perpetually at the margins, and city spaces continue to be designed in ways that ignore and negate the existence of those who protest inequity. Novel to the volume are chapters that document and illustrate contestations of city spaces through artistic representation. Public spaces like schools, art galleries and museums are presented as central to projects of inhabiting, remembering and reimagining (in) the just city. Still, ordinary city spaces, like the public washroom, illustrate issues of gender inequity, spatial bias and other art-based protests. City dwellers interested in learning about ‘the making’ of the city; and those interested in the city as a space of possibilities – and the good life, will benefit from this volume. Scholars of geography, space, art and social justice will marvel and simultaneously be appalled by the everyday minute, yet shocking descriptions of the complexity – and unfairly structured city spaces in which they dwell.

In the context of increasing division and segregation in cities across the world, along with pressing concerns around austerity, environmental degradation, homelessness, violence, and refugees, this book pursues a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice in the city. Spatial justice has been central to urban theorists in various ways. Intimately connected to social justice, it is a term implicated in relations of power which concern the spatial distribution of resources, rights and materials. Arguably there can be no notion of social justice that is not spatial. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has argued that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. As such, urban planning and policy interventions are always, to some extent at least, about spatial justice. And, as cities become ever more unequal, it is crucial that urbanists address questions of spatial justice in the city. To this end, this book considers these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Crossing law, sociology, history, cultural studies, and geography, the book’s overarching concern with how to think spatial justice in the city brings a fresh perspective to issues that have concerned urbanists for several decades. The inclusion of empirical work in London brings the political, social, and cultural aspects of spatial justice to life. The book will be of interest to academics and students in the field of urban studies, sociology, geography, planning, space law, and cultural studies.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

Returning social justice to the center of urban policy debates

If today’s cities are full of injustices, what would a 'Just City' look like? Contributors to this volume including David Harvey, Peter Marcuse and Susan Fainstein define the concept, examining it from multiple angles in addition to questioning it and suggesting alternatives.

With the advent of AIDS, the proliferation of gangs and drugs, and the uneasy sensation that Big Brother is actually watching us, the dark side of urban living seems to be overshadowing the brighter side of pleasure, liberation, and opportunity. The Urbanization of Injustice chronicles these bleak urban images, while taking to task exclusivist politics, globalization theory, and superficial environmentalism. Exploring the links between urbanism, power, and justice, The Urbanization of Injustice presents the thoughts and theories of Edward Soja, David Harvey, Marshall Bermann, Doreen Masey, Sharon Zukin, Susan Fainstein, Ira Katznelson, Nell Smith, and Michael Keith in one cohesive volume, bringing us one step closer to genuinely humane and socially just urban practices.