Critical Urban Studies by Davies and Imbroscio: Social Justice

Critical Urban Studies: New Directions is the volume edited by the political scientists Jonathan S. Davies and David L. Imbroscio, published by the State University of New York Press in 2010, which gathered researchers from the United States and the United Kingdom to revisit the central debates of urban studies from the standpoint of social justice. Its starting point is that the urban politics of the previous three decades, oriented to growth, competition among cities and partnership with private capital, had produced gentrification, privatisation of public space and displacement, and that the dominant theories, from regime theory to network governance, described that politics without questioning its foundations. The book sets out to do so.

The critique of urban neoliberalism: who gains from growth

The first axis is the critique of urban neoliberalism. The editors and contributors argue that the policies promoted by local governments and international bodies since the 1980s, investment incentives, large projects, deregulation, sale of public assets, did not improve general welfare but transferred resources and power to economic elites, and that cities, as centres of political and economic power, are the terrain where that transfer is decided and can be contested. Davies contributes a Gramscian reading of governance as hegemony, and Imbroscio a critique of the liberal consensus in American urban politics.

Social justice and urban politics: access, inclusion and real participation

The second axis is the relationship between social justice and urban politics. Justice in the city, they argue, is not limited to income but includes equitable access to housing, transport, education and public space, and requires inclusive planning that counts the traditionally marginalised. The volume converses with Susan Fainstein's just city and with the right to the city of Lefebvre and Harvey, and calls for a restructuring of public policy that shares resources better and allows real community participation in decisions affecting daily life, against the symbolic participation neoliberal governance offers.

Regime, governance and local economy: the theoretical debate

The third axis is theoretical and methodological. Several chapters revisit Clarence Stone's urban regime theory, on which Stone himself comments, and ask whether it still explains cities where capital is global and the local state has been rescaled; others discuss network governance, the political economy of the city and localism. Imbroscio defends an alternative local economy, with community ownership, anchored enterprises and endogenous development, as the material basis of a just urban politics, a position that anticipates the following decade's debates on community wealth and municipalism.

Reception, criticism and continuity of the agenda

The book was received as a necessary intervention in a field dominated by the description of governance, and also criticised for its Anglo-American anchoring, which leaves out the Global South and postcolonial urban theory, and for an unresolved tension between structural critique and Imbroscio's localist proposals, which some consider insufficient against the scale of capital. Its editors have continued the agenda: Davies in studies of austerity and urban governance in Europe, Imbroscio in the critique of American housing and mobility policy.

The lesson of Critical Urban Studies is that urban studies cannot confine themselves to explaining how cities are governed but must ask for whom, and that this question forces social justice to the centre of analysis and proposal. For planning, the volume recalls that every theory of governance contains a politics, and that describing urban neoliberalism without criticising it helps make it seem inevitable.