Abstract
Do we need a theory of urban justice? If so, what desiderata would such a theory have to meet? This paper makes a programmatic point, namely, that urban justice is a field of political philosophy in its own right, and that the recognition-theoretical approach is capable of expressing what is at stake there. A revised version of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition meets the three desiderata of a theory of urban justice: relationality, spatiality and diversity. Whereas justice-related questions on the domestic level typically refer to the basic structure of society—concerning issues of basic rights and wealth distribution—on the city level such questions are concentrated mainly on the way urban space is organized. Ultimately, what is at stake is to articulate a vision of the city as an embodiment of human space; a space that is structured in such a way that it meets the demands for recognition. The paper tests if the framework is capable of expressing the key moral challenges of two justice-related issues of contemporary cities, namely, segregation and gentrification.
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Notes
This conception of human space is quintessentially moral in nature given that it involves normative standards of recognition that it must live up to. Hence this is a fundamentally different concept of space than the phenomenology of space that Henry Lefebvre has developed and that has inspired a lot of theorists who write about cities (Purcell 2002). According to Lefebvre’s descriptive claims, space ought to be understood in terms of a dialectical triad consisting of “perceived space,” “conceived space,” and “lived space”. Space is at the same time “objectively” perceived, conceptually envisioned (maps etc.), as well as experienced and shaped by those who inhabit it (Lefebvre 1991). The only way that normativity gets introduced here is through the notion that people should have a right to control the production of space that they live in, namely in order to fit their needs (Lefebvre 1996). But we cannot simply leave such power to produce space to the citizens of cities or neighborhoods themselves in the false hope that a legitimate decision will magically appear if we only let “the people” decide (see beginning of “Urban justice as access to human space” section).
This lack of an empirically testable explanatory account of capitalist economies makes the recognition-theoretical approach a compromised framework for articulating the claims of the protests against capitalist globalization. As Zurn puts it: “The causes of the dislocations are to be found in variables specific to the global political economy: currency rates; disproportionate supply and demand; asymmetrical regulatory environments; capital flows; stratified availability of technologies; differential natural resources; diverse interest rates: differential regimes of private property; and so on. This means that recognition-based remedies will likely be simply ineffective against the root problems” (2015, p. 144). According to Zurn and others, Fraser’s theory might allow for such a framework, but her sketchy remarks on the dynamics of capitalism are far removed from an adequate account of the current state of global capitalism (Zurn 2015, p. 153; Thomson 2006, p. 117).
Such policies can only be institutionalized provided that government agencies have sufficient political power, which shows that there is no inherent incompatibility between “power” and “recognition.” In fact, the act of recognition always presupposes a certain measure of control. As I have argued before, the logic of a theory of recognition entails an actor and corresponding moral responsibility.
Margaret Kohn presents this point of view, without actually agreeing with it. Although she does believe that the choice to keep on living in an inner-city neighborhood that one cannot really afford, is basically an “expensive choice,” she argues that being threatened with eviction as a result of gentrification is still morally wrong because of “bad price luck,” a notion she borrows from Gerald Cohen. The fact that the market is responsible for the expensive nature of the taste entails that the person is not responsible for it (2016, p. 98). This strikes me as a reductionist way to argue against displacement; reductionist because it relies, I think dubiously, on the logic of autonomy-respect.
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank the following people for reading the paper and providing me with helpful suggestions: Nir Barak, Avner de-Shalit, Arnoud Lagendijk, Michael Merry, Ronald Sundstrom, Marcel Wissenburg and two anonymous reviewers.
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van Leeuwen, B. What is the point of urban justice? Access to human space. Acta Polit 57, 169–190 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00178-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00178-0