Just City

In week 12, we had a seminar for the article “New Directions in Planning Theory” written by Susan S. Fanstein. She is currently a professor of urban planning at Harvard University and widely regarded leading figure in the field of Urban Planning.In that article she has discussed and critique contemporary planning theory in terms of its usefulness in addressing its defining question: What is the possibility of consciously achieving widespread improvement in the quality of human life within the context of a global capitalist political economy? She also came up with three ideas of planning, the communicative model, the new Urbanism and the just city.

The first type of a planning, the communicative model is also called the collaborative model which emphasize the planners as a mediator, among stakeholders in certain planning circumstances. The second one, the new Urbanism just tries to figure out the physical picture of a desirable city to be obtained through planning. The last but not the least, just city, which derives from the political economy tradition presents a model of spatial relations based on equity.

Even though communicative model and the new urbanism are also sensible concept of planning theorist but concept of just city is more important for city planning. So in this blog I would like to talk more about just city. The concept of just city encourages planners and policymakers to embrace a different approach to urban development. It describes the planning theorist as an advocates-not necessarily the advocate for a particular group- but as the advocate of program. Radical democrats and political economists are the two categories of just city theorists. Radical democrats accept conflictual view of society and deny the more communicative involvement of civil society together with stakeholders. The political economists take an explicitly normative position concerning the distribution of social benefits.

Finally a theory of the just city values participation in decision making of relatively powerless groups and equity of outcomes because they are influence by concept of ideal city and neoliberalism ideology. But concept of just city will sustain forever in our rich- poor class based society?