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Summary of Lectures of City Matters
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Summary of all the lectures that were given in the course City Matters.
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City Matters: Social Justice and Urban Inequality.Week 1: Introduction – planning as a distributive issue – political economy and
justice matter!
Introduction lecture.
City matters in a nutshell:
Rethink why we plan?
Rethink for whom we plan?
Rethink the social consequences of plans?
Understanding the power structure
Analysing (un)just urban developments
Developing a well-substantiated ethical position
Designing tools to plan against vulnerability
Your decisions as a professional will create winners and losers!
Planning is always a distributive issue: You have to justify your decisions. (Political economy and
justice matter)This is not always without problems: especially issues of inequality.
Cities as ‘inequality traps’: better planning could prevent cities becoming inequality traps. Poor
planning causes segregation. Government must ensure that cities work for all.
Planning has a lot to do with distribution and spatial inequalities.
How much inequality is fair? When should you intervene? These are hard questions to answer.
Income and GDP inequalities are increasing: However, it is very context dependent.
There are different types of measures that relate to social inequality.
Social housing: Social housing is built and allocated by housing associations. The system is
based on waiting lists. Certain groups have priority (low-income, refugees, mentally ill, etc.)
Some sub-segments allocated for special groups (young people, students, etc.)
The way social housing is set up has certain distributional outcomes. These can be seen in
maps for example you can look at the ratio between housing and the number of principal
residences or the waiting list for social housing per city.
Neighbourhood upgrading: There is a want to upgrade neighbourhoods with concentrations
of poor households, criminality, low quality schools. There is low housing quality and
environmental satisfaction. Is the right action to demolish and rebuild? Who profits from
these investments.
The energy transition: We strive towards zero emission renovations. The rent increases due
to the finance of these renovations. The housing costs remain equal. Or do the poor pay the
bill?
Justice.
,What does justice actually mean? The word is used often; however, there is no clear definition. If we
talk about distributive justice, we can look at three institutions that produce inequality:
1. The state
2. The market
3. The family
Are regulations of these institutions ‘justified’ and just?
Four core concepts that we should keep in mind:
What is distributed (object)
Between whom (subject)
By whom? (power to decide)
Following which logic? (principles of justice)
In the next section we discussed the different principles of justice:
Utilitarianism
What is it?
The claim that an act is morally right if that act maximizes the good, that is to the total
amount of good for all, minus the total amount of the bad for all, is greater than this net
amount for any incompatible act available to the agent on that occasion. An act is moral if
the sum is beneficial.
Maximise the total welfare of an entire society (everybody’s welfare has equal weight)
Utility is the only thing with intrinsic value.
Critique:
Insufficient sensible to societal distribution effects
Consequentialist nature
Blind to minorities
Example: ‘As long as the cake grows, it does not matter who owns it and who gets which share’
Egalitarianism.
What is it?
Equal fundamental worth and moral status for every human being.
Inequalities due to morally arbitrary circumstances such as natural lotteries of conditions in
which one is born (e.g. health, intelligence, family) are to be compensated.
Different principle/max-min criterion: inequalities are only fair if they benefit the least
advantaged-members of society: choose policy alternative that maximizes people in worst of
positions.
Critique:
What should be equal (opportunity, rights, income,…)?
Requires ‘over a lifetime assessment
Is all inequality bad?
Sufficientarianism
What is it?
Everybody should be well off up to a certain minimum threshold, which is ‘sufficient’ for
fulfilling their basic needs, and to guarantee their continued wellbeing.
, Inequalities above the minimum threshold are significantly less important or even irrelevant.
Critique:
Interpersonal comparison: starving person might attribute high utility to a small income and
therefore considers him/herself to be well-off.
What about voluntary choice? Move & External safety
What is the threshold? (How to pinpoint it)
Examples: Social assistance (bijstand) or Housing allowance (huurtoeslag).
Prioritarianism.
What is it?
Close to utilitarianism, but: the worse-off someone is, the more benefits matter to that
person
Greater moral value, but no harsh thresholds
“Objective well-being’’: Voluntary and preferences are neglected.
Critique:
It is fair to neglect threshold and voluntarily?
Examples: Scholarships for members of disadvantaged communities. Discount on museum tickets for
specific groups.
The basic question behind justice is who deserves what?
Rights are balanced with duties. Should the lazy get their share? (And who are the lazy?).
Dworkin: brute luck versus option luck Insurances
Sen: capability approach Schooling
Rawls: social primary goods/ decisions behind the ‘veil of ignorance’ Social assistance
Equality or equity?
Equality: everyone gets the same
bike.
Equity: everyone gets a bike that is
suited to him or her.
Nevertheless, why is that so
difficult?
Political economy.
Economies and markets are created and embedded in institutions!
Political economy is the study of production and trade and their relations with law, custom
and government; and with the distribution of national income and wealth.
‘’ It is useful to think of the bargaining over urban development as involving three parties:
the state, capital and the citizens. ‘’
Who governs? This is not always clear. Authority is much more pluralistic than assumed pluralist
accounts.
Local political power is fragmented Pluralistic model of urban community power.
Leadership is pluralistic, involving many voices
National control is far less straightforward than expected.
, Who governs? Elitist account
Continuity developed out of pluralist settings
States only force expressing authority over own territories
Long-term stable urban regimes and coalitions of elites Cities as a growth machine
Governance capacity is produced through exclusive coalition building.
Who governs? Marxist/Structuralist accounts.
Global structures limit choices or predetermine available options global capitalism
determines options for cities.
Interrelations between fundamental elements (structure and agency)
Late capitalism: urban governance transforms from managerialism to entrepreneurialism
Cities as places of resistance.
It matters today & in cities! On example: The ‘real estate state’
Amazon HQ and NYC: a timeline of a botched deal HQ placement met local resistance in
NYC, leading to amazon not locating their new HQ in the city. Some say this is a loss others a
win.
“The political economy of high tech has drastically changed, moving from an open, Wild West
state to a more closed condition. A monopoly has become the dominant fact of life in the
tech world in the last twenty years, firms like Google, Apple or Cisco systems will snap up,
and often then shut-down, start-ups that might become competitors. ”
Monopoly capitalism makes an ironic frame for the architecture of Googleplexi, for these
buildings are meant to stimulate free exchange of ideas inside, even as the firms destroy free
markets outside.
‘’This book is about planners in cities run by real estate. It describes how real estate came to
rule, and what planners do under these circumstances. Planners provide a window into the
practical dynamics of urban change: the way the state both uses and is used by organized
capital, and the power of landlords and developers at every level of government. They also
possess some of the powers we must deploy if we ever wish to reclaim our cities from real
estate capital. Understanding planners is an important way to understand the capitalist state
– how it is built, and what it would take to dismantle it.”
Planners as
Healing the city? Independent, Professional & Public interest.
Guest lecture Prof. Dr. Samuel Mössner.
The ‘Green City’: A post-political critique.
Justice is not enough, we need to study different perspective to understand what justice really is.
There is a battle of ideologies: the entrepreneurial vs the sustainable city.
The Entrepreneurial city: ‘such local economic development is essentially concerned with
the prosperity of local economies and their ability to attract investment and jobs to secure
the prosperity of the locality in general’.
The Sustainable city: Rejection of functional separation. All about democratic
empowerment, environmental conservation and social justice.
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