I very much appreciate Jeffrey Isaac's invitation to comment on this important new book. Let me straightaway engage the first question he posed to us. When assessed in terms of their justice (or injustice), America's cities are, without question, unjust. On this point, Justice and the American Metropolis is spot-on. It is overwhelmingly evident that a deep-rooted and densely concentrated (or “thick”) injustice shamefully stains America's cities. Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom have done us a great service by exposing this injustice and identifying it as a subject of grave concern for political theory. By doing so, their collection does indeed lay out a central challenge of contemporary American politics. And with about 85% of the US population now living in “cities”—urban places and their suburban extensions—the centrality of this challenge is more obvious than ever, for the injustice of America's cities is now the de facto injustice of America itself.

I nevertheless find this book to be deeply flawed. The key problem is that Hayward and Swanstrom, along with many of their contributors, seriously misdiagnose the source of urban injustice. The essence of this misdiagnosis is their overreliance on space (or place) as its primary cause. In this regard, the book's “focus,” as they point out, is on one form of what Edward Soja calls spatial (in)justice:Footnote ¹ “namely, injustice generated over time by institutional structures, including structures that segregate metropolitan space by race and class” (p. 4). In this spatially focused account, urban injustice stems largely from the fact that almost everyone in the contemporary American metropolis lives in the wrong (segregated) place. What is therefore needed to remedy this injustice is a massive spatial reordering of the people themselves (via individual mobility) and/or a substantial transfer of resources across metropolitan space.Footnote ²

Over the past quarter century, this narrative has become the orthodox explanation of urban injustice in academic and (mainstream liberal) policy circles (notably including research organizations like Brookings and the Urban Institute). Both the editors of Justice and the American Metropolis and—to varying degrees—many (though not all) of the chapter authors (including Stephen Macedo, Richard Thompson Ford, Gerald Frug, Douglas W. Rae, Margaret Weir, and Thad Williamson) embrace this liberal orthodoxy. Its basic story is simple and, to anyone steeped in the academic literature on urban ills, so familiar as to seem almost banal.

In the book's introduction, Hayward and Swanstrom (pp. 4, 9–18) set out this story's three common elements—each heavily implicating spatial practices as the source of injustice. First, historic acts of racial discrimination—occurring in their most egregious form six to eight decades ago—continue to be a major force perpetuating the grim conditions experienced by contemporary black families. As they write, racially restrictive covenants and zoning laws, discriminatory New Deal-era housing policies, the early exclusion of minorities from federal mortgage programs like the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Affairs, and other collective decisions “set in motion processes whose momentum is still felt in the metropolis today” (p. 10). The burden of this history continues to confine urban blacks to inner cities and other poor areas, severely constraining their opportunities for wealth accumulation and economic advancement.

Second, massive flight from cities to suburbs in the second half of the twentieth century, coupled with a highly fragmented metropolitan institutional structure, created a decentralized but, in their view, pernicious system of regional governance. Most significant is that this system allows the wealthy to escape to privileged suburban enclaves. These suburbs, in turn, draw upon their affluence to provide quality public services (especially schools) in their jurisdictions, while using their zoning powers to keep the urban poor at bay.

Third, as a result of this historic discrimination and governmental fragmentation, “in the contemporary American Metropolis place powerfully shapes what people can do and what they can be” (p. 15). That is, place matters, Footnote ³ because where someone happens to live in a metropolitan region is a powerful, nearly determinative factor that “differentially distributes life chances” (p. 16).

This orthodox liberal account of injustice in American cities provides a compelling narrative, to be sure. The only problem is that it turns out to be empirically wrong (or at least in large measure off-target). Although a comprehensive critique cannot be developed here,Footnote ⁴ the evidence belying this account, with its strongly spatial elements, continues to mount. For example, studies of neighborhood effects—where economic disadvantage stems merely from one's place of residence (as opposed to a host of other factors)—continue to yield inconclusive or ambiguous results. Much the same can be said for the so-called spatial mismatch (where the cause of urban unemployment for minorities is attributed to their geographic separation from suburban jobs). Likewise, the results of recent policy experiments seeking to enhance the urban poor's economic opportunity by moving them to suburbs have been either inconclusive or, in the most scientifically rigorous analyses, shown to be outright failures.Footnote ⁵ In short, although there is no doubt that spatial factors contribute to the existence of urban injustice, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that they remain mostly a sideshow.

Facing up to this reality gets us to the editor's second question: What would a more serious assessment of the injustice of American cities reveal? Such an assessment requires, first and foremost, a shift from the liberal frame adopted in much of the volume under review to a more critical one.Footnote ⁶ From this more analytically and empirically powerful critical frame, one's understanding of the causes of urban injustice similarly shifts from the spatial to the systemic and structural. So, the chronic and acute racial inequalities between whites and blacks in contemporary America are most accurately understood as arising from ongoing “structural racism and policies that privilege the white position,” rather than the spatial segregation of blacks from whites in cities.Footnote ⁷ Similarly, the plight of central cities and other poor areas in the American Metropolis results not so much from the fragmented nature of regional governance, but rather from a broader, widespread failure of the American political-economic system.Footnote ⁸ Thus, in the end, place (or space) matters as a driver of the appalling injustice plaguing the American Metropolis. But race and economic structure matter more—much more.Footnote ⁹

When urban injustice is analyzed with this more serious, critical frame rather than a liberal one, much of its ostensible “thickness” thins out. As conceptualized by Hayward and Swanstrom (pp. 4, 9), urban injustice is thick injustice not only because the “unjust power relations” at its root “are deeply and densely concentrated.” It is also thick because it is “opaque,” “difficult to assign moral responsibility for,” “difficult to see,” “obscure,” and difficult to “motivate collective action to change.” Only from a liberal frame could our political-economic system—where whites are 20 times wealthier than African Americans and the 1% has more net worth than the entire bottom 90%—be characterized as engendering injustice that is opaque, difficult to assign moral responsibility for, or obscure. Similarly, while it is certainly true that it is difficult to motivate collective action to rectify this injustice, these difficulties arise in part because the hegemony of the liberal frame itself obscures unjust institutional practices, making them seem opaque and thus difficult to comprehend. Most notable here is the public–private distinction embedded in liberalism, where practices of a collective and political nature are understood as private matters of individual choice and economics.Footnote ¹⁰

A final irony is that the solutions offered by the liberal orthodoxy would, in the process of constructing this spatial justice, introduce much, if not more, new injustice to the American metropolis. To set these injustices right, this orthodoxy advocates some combination of mass mobility across metropolitan space (to rectify racial and economic segregation) and a sizable centralization of political power to larger units (to eviscerate the local control that creates privileged enclaves). Both of these policy alternatives are highly problematic from a normative perspective. And their widespread unpopularity make them political dead ends as well.Footnote ¹¹

Finally, to address the remaining question posed to us, American political science (in its mainstream form, at least) looks almost wholly deficient when assessed in terms of the seriousness of its analysis of urban injustice. In fact, it is “embarrassingly defective,” to quote the venerable Charles Lindblom engaging a similar question in his 1981 American Political Science Association presidential address.Footnote ¹² Most crucially, the mainstream of the discipline remains largely blind to the scope and nature of this injustice. This embarrassing defectiveness results not so much because (as suggested in the editor's charge to this symposium) “urban politics” is neglected by political science scholarship. Rather, it is a symptom of the larger deficiencies of the mainstream.

As I have written at length before,Footnote ¹³ mainstream American political science adopts a faulty conception of political power (pluralism), conducts empirical inquiry via epistemologically and methodologically dubious modes (behavioralism and rational choice), and is imbued with value biases causing it to generate scholarship that—unwarrantedly—celebrates the status quo in America. All of these deficiencies leave mainstream political science not only incapable of offering a serious account of urban injustice; they also cause it to misunderstand much of American politics in general. Ironically, a great deal of urban scholarship, produced both within the urban subfield of political science as well as cognate disciplines, largely avoids these deficiencies, in part because it better heeds Lindblom's exhortation to “call more heavily on radical thought.”Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore, while there have been many pleas to make the study of cities more like the mainstream's study of American politics,Footnote ¹⁵ a more fruitful path for scholarship would likely be quite the reverse.Footnote ¹⁶