When the new Yankee Stadium opened in the Bronx in April 2009, the project was mired in controversy. Built on what had been 24 acres of well-utilized public parkland, it was the world's most expensive baseball stadium. Although its construction was supported by tax-exempt bonds and other forms of direct and indirect public support, tickets for Yankees Stadium were priced such that only the wealthy could afford to make use of the new facility. Susan Fainstein, in The Just City, notes that “the richest team in baseball attain[ed] enormous benefits from the city, state, and federal governments and [kept] all the revenues from the lucrative skyboxes and ancillary commercial establishments” (p. 109).

The Yankee Stadium project—justified by proponents in the language of “economic growth”—failed along all three of the dimensions that, according to Fainstein, measure the justness of urban policy: equity, democracy, and diversity. It burdened the disadvantaged (low-income residents of the Bronx), while benefiting the well-off (the Yankees franchise and its wealthy patrons), thus failing to promote equity. It was designed and implemented in a top-down fashion, largely ignoring the views and preferences of local community members, thus failing to promote democracy. And it created a space of consumption that excluded all but those with the resources needed to obtain tickets, thus failing to promote diversity.

Fainstein's aim is to make the case for maximizing these three values in city planning and in urban policymaking. Since the 1970s and the 1980s, she argues persuasively, the focus in urban governance in the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe as well has been the promotion of growth, with a view to increasing competitiveness in the global economy. Instead, political decision makers ought to plan and govern with a view to promoting justice. Specifically, the author argues, they should work to maximize equity, diversity, and democracy.

At least that is her stated position. In the first and second chapters, however, Fainstein makes clear that equity, defined as “a distribution of both material and nonmaterial benefits derived from public policy that does not favor those who are already better off at the beginning” is, in her view, the most important of these three values (p. 109). She draws on John Rawls' theory of justice and on Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's “capabilities approach” to define equity in terms of the distribution of capabilities (that is, opportunities to function along important dimensions, such as health, access to education, and control over the political and material environment) in ways that mitigate disadvantage.

Equity often conflicts with democracy and diversity, however, and when it does, the author argues, equity should prevail. The trouble with an emphasis on democracy (she cites both the deliberative democracy literature in political theory and the focus on “community control” in urban planning) is that democratic processes do not necessarily yield just results. In cities, property owners and middle-class urban residents are more likely to participate politically than are renters and low-income residents. What is more, structural relations of power shape democratic processes in ways that amplify the voices of the privileged, while limiting the efficacy of the disadvantaged. “In an unequal society,” says Fainstein, “democracy and justice are frequently at odds” (p. 30).

The trouble with an emphasis on diversity is threefold. First, promoting diversity can undermine liberty. According to Fainstein, “Requiring people to move against their will in order to achieve racial balance or dispersion of poverty is counterproductive and an infringement on liberty” (p. 72). Second, promoting diversity can harm the disadvantaged, especially in the case of gentrification, which can cause “the remaining low-income residents … [to] lose their sense of ownership of the area even if they receive improved services” (p. 74). Third, promoting diversity can undermine “[t]rust … altruism and community cooperation” (p. 75).

By the final chapter, in which Fainstein spells out the principles according to which, on her view, cities ought to be governed, it is clear that her argument is less for equity, democracy, and diversity than for equity, the fair representation of affected interests, and nonexclusion. This position is a reasonable one, and her principles help clarify what it demands. However, the book would have benefitted from a tighter link between the theoretical arguments in the first chapters and the enumeration of the principles in the last. Much of the theoretical argument in the early chapters is devoted to criticizing the understandings of democracy and diversity that Fainstein rejects. Relatively little is devoted to defending the views she supports. The reader is left wanting to know more about her arguments in favor of representation and nonexclusion. Does representative democracy, for instance, suffer from problems similar to those she identifies with deliberative democracy? If all interests are fairly represented, might the results of decision making nevertheless be unjust?

The middle chapters of consist of case studies of New York, London, and Amsterdam, from the postwar years through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Here, Fainstein applies her evaluative argument, making the case that New York fares the worst according to her standards of justice and Amsterdam the best, with London falling in the middle. In the New York and London cases, the crucial turning point was the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, after which the neoliberal agenda in each city reshaped urban planning from an emphasis on redistribution to an emphasis on global competitiveness.

Amsterdam, by contrast, comes very close to being a “just city.” Moroccans and Turks, the largest immigrant groups in the city, are well incorporated in the urban educational and employment structures. The city government is decentralized to the district level, which enables substantial popular participation in planning. And even at the turn of the twenty-first century, the majority of Amsterdam's residents live in social housing or benefit from rent control in private housing, reducing expenditures on rent and thus promoting equity. The key to Amsterdam's success, according to Fainstein, is centralized revenue provision combined with decentralized decision making. She writes that the “municipality could afford generous benefit levels because it received almost all of its revenues from the national government rather than its own taxpayers, placing the city in the enviable position of possessing both considerable policy autonomy and substantial funding from an outside source” (p. 143).

Fainstein acknowledges, then, that city planning and policymaking are constrained by the national context, as well as by the neoliberal global capitalist regime. Her aim, nevertheless, is to identify what, following Nancy Fraser, she calls “nonreformist reforms”: changes that planners and policymakers working locally and under status quo conditions might feasibly make, which might in turn make possible future structural change (p. 18).

It is to this end that Fainstein elaborates principles to guide progressive political actors at the local level. These are guidelines for thinking about, and for acting politically to effect, decisions taken locally, such as decisions about whether to publicly support a stadium project that promises economic development and growth. “Forcing decision makers to make justice a principal consideration in urban policies would be more than a marginal change,” she writes, “and while in isolation such endeavors would not be structurally transformative, as a component of broader national and international movements they would add to overall pressure for restructuring capitalism into a more humane system” (p. 6).