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American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

A Discussion of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis

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Justice and the American Metropolis. Edited by Clarissa RileHayward and ToddSwanstrom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 280p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 August 2012

Kent E. Portney
Kent E. Portney
Affiliation:
Tufts University
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor

Information

Type
Review Symposium: American Cities and American Political Science—A Look at Thick Injustice
Information
Perspectives on Politics , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 2012, pp. 727 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 2012

What a breath of fresh air it is to see the publication of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's book. I have long argued that inequality represents a sort of palimpsest of American policies, the tablet on which the history of American cities, in particular, have been written and re-rewritten over the decades. With the newfound attention to issues of inequality in American society, various forms of urban metropolitan inequality inevitably take front and center, if for no other reason than cities are the places where poverty becomes concentrated. My own lens on justice and inequality tends to focus on environmental issues, where I am particularly interested in understanding the evolution of sustainability policies and programs in American cities.

Sustainability may, first and foremost, conjure concern about the biophysical environment, but from its earliest conceptions, environmental justice has been a key component. Often described as one of the three “Es” of sustainability, equity is often thought of as an equal partner with the environment and the economy as elements of sustainability.Footnote 1 Even though none of the chapters in this book discusses sustainability per se, it is in this context that the Hayward and Swanstrom book is such a welcome addition. The essays in Justice and the American Metropolis, a mixture of theoretical and empirical, raise a variety of important questions that perhaps set the stage for more sustained and serious scholarly concern in political science.

The first three essays provide different perspectives on the history and underlying causes of urban and metropolitan inequality. For Stephen Macedo, the problem essentially lies in the structure of local governance institutions and the policies they are responsible for pursuing. For Loren King, competing conceptions of fairness and justice undermine local government's ability to redress issues of inequality. For him, serious efforts to deal with inequality would require a revolution of sorts, “dramatic changes in the definition of property, systematic (and expensive) overhaul of influential building code standards, and the orientation of urban zoning and redevelopment efforts toward diverse uses” (pp. 76–77). King may be correct, and this is where local sustainability policies become so important. In a sense, this revolution may well be under way in many cities around the United States. I will return to this issue later. For Margaret Kohn, the promise of the democratizing effects of open spaces and parks has never quite been realized, to the detriment of robust citizenship.

Perhaps the three most challenging essays are those by Douglas W. Rae, Clarence N. Stone, and Susan S. Fainstein. Rae, ever the apologist for urban economic inequality, simply argues that inequality is largely the product of wealth rather than poverty, and applauds the mal-distribution of incomes within cities because otherwise, metropolitan inequality would reflect concentrations of poverty in cities and wealth in surrounding suburbs. Stone's essay suggests that the answer to redressing the equity–efficiency trade-off lies in aspects of civil society—in the nonprofit mediating institutions that provide services to people underserved by city government and by the private sector. Fainstein offers criticisms of various waves of cities' redevelopment policies, suggesting that the time is ripe for planners to reconsider the equity implications of their plans and policies through an “outcomes-oriented approach.”

In two descriptive essays, Gerald Frug and Richard Thompson Ford, respectively, provide abundant explanations for why urban and metropolitan inequality exists. For Frug, the key explanation is limited access to the political system and political power. For Ford, the story is about the legacy of laws and policies that promote and produce racial segregation.

In two prescriptive essays, Thad Williamson and Margaret Weir, respectively, offer complementary views about where the focus of urban and metropolitan policy and research needs to be located if equity issues are to be addressed. Williamson suggests the need to “relegitimize” an activist role for city government so that it can once again become politically safe for local leaders to try to tackle inequities. Weir's essay suggests that the fabric of metropolitan areas has changed fairly drastically, especially with regard to the character of inequities, and that various new forms of governance and civil society have started to emerge to address many of these changes. The implication is that promoting such new forms of governance is a positive development in the search for solutions to inequality.

The Promise of Sustainability in American Cities

Under the radar screen of most people, many cities in the United States have embarked on serious efforts to try to become more sustainable as a matter of public policy. Cities such as Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, New York, Albuquerque, and many others now have official sustainability policies, and have made remarkable strides in defining a wide array of programs designed to make these policies operational. These sustainability policies seek to protect and improve cities' environments, to define a new model of local economic development, and, in some cases, to redress environmental and social inequities.

Of course, cities vary in the extent to which they adopt and implement specific programs and policies. Of course, skeptics will point to the lengthy history of cities' inability to come to grips with any of these goals and suggest that any such efforts are doomed to failure. Yet cities have shown remarkable ability to achieve impressive results. Indeed, since the middle to late 1990s, there may well be something of a revolution under way where cities have redefined their zoning and land-use policies (to protect open spaces and environmentally sensitive areas, and to encourage mixed uses and transit-oriented housing development), building codes (to accommodate and incentivize green building and energy efficiency, even in low-income neighborhoods), climate action and climate justice policies (to work toward reducing their carbon emissions), and many other substantive areas.

Even though many cities do not elevate the discussion of sustainability to include explicit treatment of inequities, a number of the specific policies and programs have the inevitable result of producing disproportionate benefit to lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color. A number of cities have elected to use their Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant funds (such as Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago), or have joined forces with major community foundations or nonprofit organizations (such as Boston and Cambridge, MA), to target lower-income neighborhoods for energy efficiency. Yet the pursuit of equity in cities' sustainability programs is sometimes less direct. For example, when a city develops a brownfield redevelopment program primarily because of geographic proximity to lower-income people and people of color, it presumably redresses environmental inequities. When a city adopts an aggressive lead paint abatement program because of the nature of exposure to lead paint itself, it presumably provides a disproportionate benefit to children in lower-income households.

The empirical analysis of cities' sustainability policies is in its infancy. Yet such research offers a unique opportunity for political scientists to understand the role of political institutions and governance in the transformation of American cities. Recent works have analyzed the importance of political culture,Footnote 2 political institutions,Footnote 3 public engagement,Footnote 4 and nonprofit organizationsFootnote 5 in such transformations. Clearly, there is considerable variation in how well cities explicitly accommodate various equity concerns in their sustainability efforts.Footnote 6 Several years ago, when I was doing the initial research for my sustainable cities book, I recall having a conversation with a city councilor in a midsized southern city. When I asked him, innocently enough, what his city had done to incorporate equity issues into its much-touted sustainability effort, I was greeted with several seconds of silence. He then said, “Now there you go, trying to get your Marxist agenda into our sustainability program.” The message was clear: Sustainability did not include equity concerns in that city.

With this said, my own curiosity led me to wonder whether the character of economic inequality is related to the pursuit of sustainability policies in cities. If city inequality is such a good thing, as Rae argues in Chapter 4, is there evidence to suggest that cities with greater inequality are better able to pursue sustainability? Rae presents a measure of the shape of the metropolitan distribution of income. What he calls “left-biased” cities are those where the central city possesses a disproportionate amount of lower incomes relative to their suburbs. “Right-biased” cities are those where the central city possesses a disproportionate amount of higher incomes relative to their suburbs. And “polarized” cities are those where the distribution of lower and higher incomes is fairly even. Does the shape of the distribution of incomes affect cities' abilities to pursue sustainability? He leaves us with the impression that the distribution is somehow related to city policies. If Rae is correct, left-biased cities should have significantly more difficulty adopting and implementing sustainability than right-biased or even polarized cities.

My measure of cities' policy commitment to sustainability is a simple summary measure of the number of some 38 specific programs designed to try to achieve greater sustainability. These include land use and zoning policies, energy efficiency programs, transit-oriented housing policies, climate change efforts, and many others.Footnote 7 The scatterplot in Figure 1 shows the relationship between the Selection Ratio and the Sustainability Score.Footnote 8 Overall, the relationship is quite weak, and far weaker than many other possible explanations for the pursuit of sustainability, including per capita income, the relative size of cities' Creative Class,Footnote 9 and others.Footnote 10 Certainly, the cities that appear most successful at addressing sustainability are those that are right-biased, that is, cities where the city itself has a relatively high proportion of the metropolitan area's high-income earners, and perhaps the “polar” cities where cities and their suburbs have approximately equal income shares. Yet there are a number of such cities that have been unwilling or unable to be aggressive in their pursuit of sustainability, including Virginia Beach, Tampa, Houston, and Atlanta, among others. Moreover, left-biased cities, such as Philadelphia and Columbus, have been able to adopt and implement a variety of sustainability-related policies, including those that directly address issues of environmental equity. The point is that when viewed through the lens of the city pursuit of sustainability, an understanding of the shape of metropolitan income inequality does not take us very far.

Figure 1

Scatterplot of the relation between the Rae Selection Ratio and the policy pursuit of sustainability in 32 of the largest 55 US cities. Total sustainability score = −1.05 (Rae Selection Ratio) + 29.2. R2 = .106 (significance = .036).

Overall Lessons

I come away from reading the Hayward and Swanstrom book energized by the potential for research in political science to address issues of inequity and inequality. I would summarize the lessons into six points:

  1. 1. The time is ripe for political science to reengage issues of inequality.

  2. 2. Opportunities for the development of new and more robust political theories of inequality exist, and they offer different understandings of the contemporary state of inequality, in all its dimensions.

  3. 3. The empirical analysis of inequality in political science has lagged behind other kinds of analysis, and yet opportunities abound for the operationalization and measurement of inequality in cities.

  4. 4. Analysis of the relationship between measures of inequality in cities and metropolitan areas needs to be more directly linked to urban policies, programs, and results. Is there evidence that cities have defined new policies and programs that effectively deal with the wide array of inequality issues facing the people of their cities? Does the shape of the distribution of incomes in metropolitan areas actually exert influence on cities' policies, and on cities' abilities to address other kinds of inequities?

  5. 5. Older understandings and previously established relationships among inequality, urban governance, and urban policies and programs need to be reassessed. Governance processes and institutions seem to have markedly changed, with implications that newer processes and institutional arrangements may be better able to address inequity and inequality issues.

  6. 6. Many cities have embarked on new policy initiatives, and the equity consequences of these initiatives need to be analyzed. As in the case of the pursuit of sustainability, promises that cities will be made more equitable places need to be critically studied. If there is a revolution of sorts under way in American cities, this is something that needs to be better understood.

Cities and their metropolitan areas offer an excellent locus of research on these issues of inequality. And Hayward and Swanstrom have made an important contribution by bringing these issues to the fore.

Footnotes

1 Saha and Paterson Reference Saha and Paterson2008; Warner Reference Warner2002.

2 Budd et al. Reference Budd, Lovrich, Pierce and Chamberlain2008.

3 Feiock and Bae Reference Feiock and Bae2011; Lubell, Feiock, and de la Cruz Reference Lubell, Feiock and de la Cruz2005.

4 Portney and Cuttler Reference Portney and Cuttler2010.

5 Portney and Berry Reference Portney and Berry2010.

6 Pearsall and Pierce Reference Pearsall and Pierce2010; Warner Reference Warner2002; Zeemering Reference Zeemering2009.

7 See http://www.ourgreencities.com for a complete listing of the 38 policies and programs used in constructing this score.

8 For unexplained reasons, Rae provides Selection Ratios for only 32 of the largest 55 US cities, while presenting Ratios for many smaller cities.

9 Florida Reference Florida2002; Reference Florida2005.

10 Portney, Reference Portney2008. The correlation between 2010 per capita income and the Sustainability Score for the 55 largest US cities = .425 (sig = .00), and between Florida's Creative Class index = .554 (sig = .00).

References

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Figure 0

Figure 1Scatterplot of the relation between the Rae Selection Ratio and the policy pursuit of sustainability in 32 of the largest 55 US cities. Total sustainability score = −1.05 (Rae Selection Ratio) + 29.2. R2 = .106 (significance = .036).