The thesis of this volume is that cities have become sites of “thick injustice.” Different theories of justice can identify these injustices: John Rawls's liberalism, Michael Walzer's communitarianism, and even Robert Nozick's libertarianism, according to the editors of this fine volume (pp. 6–9). And yet injustices within cities in the United States persist, and geography allows such injustices to thicken since place “hides it away” (p. 17). Segregation between cities and suburbs, among different suburbs, and within the city itself due to the way that it has become zoned, gated, segmented, and enclaved allows the privileged to go about their lives without experiencing the thick injustices of American cities. While the privileged are insulated from urban injustices, the disadvantaged are kept away from social networks of advantage, and the latters' voices of protest are displaced, if not attacked, by city police on the rare instance when they are able to overcome the fragmentation of the contemporary urban landscape.Footnote ¹ Why is the very question of justice foreclosed by urban politics and policies today when the question seemed so pressing a generation ago? Neoliberalism foreclosed the question of justice.

I will situate my discussion of Justice and the American Metropolis in the context of neoliberalism, a theme that might have been highlighted more by the volume. Attention to the way that neoliberalism informed the transformation of cities as they responded to the urban crisis of the 1970s allows us to grasp how the question of justice has become foreclosed to urban politics and policy. Once the neoliberal setting for current urban politics and policies has been established, I can proceed to discuss how the essays in this volume navigate its challenges.

Neoliberalism defines itself against postwar Keynsianism represented by the New Deal or the Great Society in the United States.Footnote ² Neoliberalism is a “process of politically assisted market rule.”Footnote ³ According to Michel Foucault, the essential thing about markets for neoliberals is competition, which means that inequality is a necessary consequence of neoliberalism.Footnote ⁴ Neoliberalism uses the market as a way to imagine government itself, to inform government action, and neoliberalism opens domains previously governed in accordance with other principles (human dignity, equal citizenship, social security and welfare, to each according to his or her need, the public interest) to market competition, and competition's concomitant inequalities. Insofar as urban politics and policy remain in the grip of neoliberalism, then, the very question of justice is foreclosed by neoliberalism's embrace of market competition and its antipathy to addressing the common good of all.

Cities are at the center of the story of neoliberal transformation. By the 1970s, cities were facing a looming fiscal crisis due to deindustrialization, depopulation (especially the loss of the middle class), and the impoverishment and destabilization of black communities due to the location of highway building.Footnote ⁵ This crisis is represented most prominently by New York City. While Miriam Greenberg contends that New York City's 1975 budget shortfall was due to “increasing use of ‘corporate welfare’ to placate members of its finance and real estate sectors [and] short-sighted borrowing strategies to fund these misguided expenditures,” such as “tax abatements for large real estate firms and outright subsidies of commercial property development through mortgage underwriting,” it is undeniable that the federal government made an example of this famously liberal city with strong public sector unions by refusing to assist it when New York City was on the brink of bankruptcy.Footnote ⁶ As the city's government was displaced from democratically accountable officials to the Municipal Assistance Corporation (“Big Mac”) and the Emergency Financial Control Board (EFCB)—supragovernmental bodies populated by the finance sector, real estate, and corporate chief executive officers—poorer people and public employees bore the brunt of the crisis.

Twenty-five hundred city workers were fired (disproportionately affecting blacks and Spanish speakers while weakening public sector unions). Pay increases were deferred for the remaining city employees, subway fares were increased, tuition was charged at City University, the procedures for obtaining welfare were made more strict, the basic assistance level was frozen between 1974 and 1981 despite a 68% increase to the cost of living, and the city drew from its capital budget to finance current expenditures, leading to a deterioration of city infrastructure and parks.Footnote ⁷ In a ritual of degradation, the public sector unions' pension funds were used to purchase unsellable city bonds that the private sector refused to buy to bail out the city.Footnote ⁸

New York City continued its policies of deindustrialization, while assisting the “FIRE” industries of finance, insurance, and real estate.Footnote ⁹ The city also sought to rebrand itself through an aggressive effort to appeal to tourists and visitors, spearheaded by its I♥NY marketing campaign. The I♥NY campaign highlighted New York as a center of finance and culture, while occluding “negative associations” of growing poverty in boroughs other than Manhattan, worker unrest, and crime.Footnote ¹⁰

New York City's austerity policies toward public employees and poorer people in response to its fiscal crisis, and the I♥NY campaign, are significant as examples of neoliberal, post-Fordist urbanism. The city is turned into a commodity that communicates to targeted market niches. The austerity measures and the marketing campaign send a message to corporations and the finance sector that New York is a hospitable place for business. Because the federal government cut aid to cities dramatically in the 1980s and 1990s, cities have become more dependent on debt to finance the upkeep of infrastructure, improvements, or larger projects such as sports stadiums. This means that cities have become dependent on bond-rating agencies since their rating determines whether cities will be able to issue debt, and how much interest they will have to pay.Footnote ¹¹ Therefore, bond-rating agencies are an important audience to which cities must also communicate. The combination of “austerity” and “I♥NY” helps to manage New York City's image in this aesthetic domain that is so critical for city budgets.Footnote ¹² Finally, the glamour, spectacle, and fun of the I♥NY campaign appeals aesthetically to visitors and tourists.

More generally, the loss of their middle-class tax base, deindustrialization, and reductions in federal aid forced cities to become more “entrepreneurial.”Footnote ¹³ In response, cities began to think about ways to raise revenue from those who do not live in the city but who might be persuaded to visit. To achieve this goal, cities oriented their infrastructure away from residents and toward tourists, shoppers, and conventions.Footnote ¹⁴ Cities entered a global, interurban competition for visitor money. To construct and market this “fantasy city,” they built festival malls and created “tourist bubbles,” zones sanitized of urban disorder with heightened security for consumption.Footnote ¹⁵ They sought to convey the message that they were “mega-event capable” by hosting major sporting events or political conventions, and by managing this symbolic production without disruption, be that disruption from crime, terrorism, or a political demonstration.Footnote ¹⁶

The neoliberal, post-Fordist city must communicate not only fun but also an aesthetics of security to lure the middle or upper classes back as tourists or shoppers. Not only does crime need to be prevented from those sanitized spaces dedicated to consumption, but the perception of danger, poverty, or “disorder” needs to be controlled as well. Zero-tolerance (ZT), quality of life (QOL) policing is the doppelganger of the “fun” city of consumption. For example, Seattle uses “park exclusion” rules and “trespass admonishments”—orders that are civil in nature, but the violation of which would become a criminal offense—to keep the visibly poor away from downtown areas frequented by tourists; that is, many of the visibly poor in Seattle are banished from the downtown.Footnote ¹⁷ Urban efforts to produce reassuring signs for consumers, or to increase the value of property for the FIRE industries, rely on “postliberal” methods of policing.Footnote ¹⁸

Zero-tolerance policing shares with modernist penology a preventative orientation. The difference is that modernist penology links crime to socioeconomic deprivation, whereas ZT assumes that some, for whatever reason, are prone to evil. Therefore, ZT policing utilizes risk profiles, such as the way that the New York Police have unapologetically targeted Muslims for surveillance and blacks and Latinos for a “stop” and “frisk.”Footnote ¹⁹ Because some are simply prone to evil if given an opportunity, it is logical to treat “fare beaters” with “zero tolerance,” or to support “three-strikes” legislation that can lead to life sentences for relatively minor crimes (Lockyer v. Andrade 2003). By imprisoning someone on something minor, the reasoning runs, the penal system has prevented a worse crime from occurring. Prisons have become warehouses devoted to “incapacitation” or “waste management.”Footnote ²⁰

The prison is part of a system of banishment and ritualistic degradation for unwanted populations. The incarceration rate in the United States is more than 700 per 100,000 residents (compared to a relatively stable rate of about 100 per 100,000 through much of the country's history).Footnote ²¹ In 1930—during the era of “Jim Crow”—blacks represented 22% of those admitted to prison; by 1992, blacks became more than 50% of those admitted to prison.Footnote ²² Not only is there a sharp racial disparity to the United States prison population but there is a deep class disparity as well.Footnote ²³ As Loic Wacquant reports, “fewer than half of inmates held a full-time job at the time of arraignment and two-thirds issue from households with an annual income coming to less than half the ‘poverty line.’”Footnote ²⁴ Much as the neoliberal, post-Fordist city markets itself to particular market niches, likewise the carceral boom in the United States is a burden that also falls on selected segments of the population.

Beginning in the 1970s, the carceral boom is linked to neoliberal, post-Fordist urban restructuring. Deindustrialization, on the one hand, and capital's increasing ability to do with fewer workers, on the other, mean that the bodies of those who either were workers or might have been workers are now rendered “disposable.”Footnote ²⁵ When urban police clear space of “undesirables” to prepare it for redevelopment, they are investing this parcel of real estate with value as a commodity.Footnote ²⁶ By focusing on post-Fordist production of symbolic capital and consumable spaces, moreover, cities employ ZT, QOL policing to communicate an image of safety through targeted forms of harassment and banishment of those who interfere with the production of a city's brand or a particular aesthetic experience.

In the Hayward and Swanstrom volume, Susan Fainstein criticizes Sharon Zukin's “nostalgia for a manufacturing city that has faded from existence,” doubting that “the white-collar proletariat now resident in American metropolises would share her negative feelings toward cappuccino.” This new urban “culture … cannot be seen as constituting a level of injustice comparable to evicting families from their homes or demolishing their place of work,” which often occurred as a result of urban renewal efforts in the middle of the twentieth century (p. 162). My point in noting that “postliberal policing” is the doppelganger of the neoliberal, post-Fordist city is to draw attention, lacking in this volume, to the way that the production of cultural experiences in the contemporary city is premised on ZT policing that incorporates targeted forms of harassment and banishment. When realtors, shoppers, or tourists are charmed by their experience sipping cappuccino at an outdoor café, unfortunately part of that aesthetic appeal has been produced through ZT policing.

I have characterized developments in urban planning since the 1970s, described by Fainstein, as attributable to neoliberalism's emergence and entrenchment. This puts me in accord with Thad Williamson's critique of the “neoliberal assault on the state” (p. 178).Footnote ²⁷ Neoliberalism's impetus to privatize, or its demand that “government mimic the market,” trades on the delegitimation of the public sector and the public interest (p. 184). If this persists, then the inequalities of market competition and the evisceration of democratic capacity by privatization will also persist. Therefore, as Williamson argues, we require “an active public sector capable of taking aggressive action to forward the public interest and rectify social injustice” (p. 185).

We can contrast Williamson's boldness to Loren King's caution. Despite arguing that “[m]ost entrenched injustices will be recognized within public reason,” King finds that addressing “these biases directly and aggressively” (biases he attributes to the “neoliberal status quo”) would require “public coercion” that, he asserts, is a “nonstarter” politically, even if “what our cities really need is revolution of this sort” (pp. 76–77). At the precise moment King identifies the antagonism between neoliberalism and the requirements of justice, he hesitates at the political challenge of acting on behalf of justice.

Political science teaches that the political system responds to organized pressure. Since the 1970s, the voices of various corporate and financial interests have become more amplified, while the representation of the interests of labor, the middle class, and the poor have been drowned out.Footnote ²⁸ Correspondingly, government policies have benefited the former over the latter.Footnote ²⁹ Therefore, if we avoid the political challenge with which we are confronted, we can expect neoliberalism's production of injustices and democratic incapacitation to continue.

Are urban injustices even susceptible to redress at the level of the city, or must action occur at another level? Clarence Stone gives us some hope that through creative coalition building, the conditions of life in American cities can be improved. Other contributors, such as Stephen Macedo and Richard Thompson Ford, suggest that the relevant scale for action might be the state level of government. States decide how to fund their educational systems, and unequal educational opportunity is a significant urban injustice, according to Macedo. Municipalities are creatures of the states, constitutionally speaking, which means that states ought to rearrange jurisdictional boundaries if we are ever to redress the inequalities produced by racially segregated education, as Ford points out. For Margaret Weir, however, due to the increased geographic complexity of unequal access to jobs, social networks, and state services, changes at the level of federal policy are needed in order to “mitigate those disadvantages” (p. 253). For still others, urban injustices are a consequence of the global scale of neoliberalism.Footnote ³⁰

Additionally, we face the problem of political socialization. The longer neoliberalism persists, the more extensively and deeply it socializes us to become neoliberal subjects. King exemplifies this quandary when he states: “[W]e must ‘incorporate an entrepreneurial state that not only provides welfare but also generates increased wealth; moreover, it needs to project a future embodying a middle class society rather than only empowering the poor and disenfranchised’” (p. 77, quoting Fainstein Reference Fainstein2000). Let us examine King's statement in terms of political coalitions and the kind of state formations that they support.Footnote ³¹

According to Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, during the era of the New Deal state (1930s–1970s), the managerial classes aligned with the popular classes. Under neoliberalism, the managerial classes align themselves with the capitalist classes.Footnote ³² The way that King disassociates himself from the “poor and disenfranchised” illustrates the political coalition that permits neoliberalism's injustices to persist. On this point, Margaret Kohn is perspicacious for the way that she identifies the need to build institutions that allow extended interactions across class lines, not only for the purpose of educating the underclass but because the privileged require the benefits of social learning as well (p. 93). Such institutions in support of social learning are necessary if the political coalition enabling neoliberalism is to shift.

Finally, there is Douglas Rae's disturbing “Two Cheers for Very Unequal Incomes.” Rae takes as “given the national rise in … inequality experienced since the early 1970s” (p. 106), that is to say, neoliberalism. Only levels of government above the city have the resources to address this economic inequality (p. 114). With this assumption, it is better that inequalities exist within the city rather than between localities since this will give the city much-needed resources (pp. 121–22). Therefore, the goal of cities should be to appeal to the wealthy. This position reiterates at the local level the inequalities that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) attribute to national politics. Yet if cities take Rae's advice and intensify an interurban competition to appeal to the wealthiest, then the aggregate effects of this competition would further amplify at the local level a structure that is already highly inegalitarian because it is believed that the structure itself must be taken for granted. Neoliberalism is thus “crucial in reinforcing, extending, and normalizing these transurban tendencies.”Footnote ³³

In conclusion, the essays in Justice and the American Metropolis indicate two paths. We can take the “neoliberal status quo” for granted because change is unthinkable, change is not preferred, or urban policy can do nothing to change neoliberalism so it must go along. This path, however, forecloses directly addressing problematic urban injustices. Or political science must recognize forthrightly that ameliorating urban injustices and an orientation to the public interest means that antagonism is unavoidable.

Thirty years ago, two renowned political scientists came to the same conclusion. Robert Dahl argued that democracy and corporate capitalism are conflicting ideals. Either self-government is the superior principle or it is the subordinate principle.Footnote ³⁴ Charles Lindblom described how markets imprison politics, policies, and our very thinking. According to Lindblom, we take the market as “fixed,” and find it difficult to consider “the market as the variable.”Footnote ³⁵ For political science to contribute to the possibility of justice in American cities, the discipline needs to return to these works that did not shy away from the contradiction they exposed, and address this contradiction in our teaching and in our scholarship. Political scientists cannot remain neutral regarding neoliberalism if their commitment is to redress urban injustices and to improve society's capacity for democratic self-government.