A City of Citizens: Social Justice and Urban Social Citizenship

Abstract

Social justice in the city has re-emerged as a critical issue in recent years. Especially important has been Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom’s 2011 edited volume, Justice and the American Metropolis, which contains essays by a series of leading urbanists, writing mainly from a liberal perspective. While the renewed interest in social justice in the city is welcome, the analysis provided by many scholars working within the liberal tradition, I argue, is limited in two crucial ways. First, they tend to ground their analysis in a Rawlsian conception of justice, which does not grapple sufficiently with issues of power, political economy, or citizenship. Second, the prescriptions that emerge too often promise to do little more than make modest improvements to a profoundly unjust set of arrangements. This article seeks to tackle the question of social justice from a different direction. Instead of using John Rawls’s ideas as the place of departure, I will, instead, draw on T.H. Marshall’s notion of social citizenship. I argue that social justice in the city is secured to the extent that its inhabitants achieve the status of full social citizenship. In so doing, this article considers what viewing urban social justice through a social citizenship lens implies about the domains of health, housing, and economic security, and examines how various cities have attempted to promote social justice in these areas. I argue that an urban social citizenship perspective offers a vision of social justice in the city that is both radical and concrete.