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Chapter 2 Restoring Just Outcomes to Planning Concerns Norman Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein Creating a more just world has been a human goal ever since injustice was recognized and defined. Needless to say, the definitions of just outcomes and the methods for attaining them have differed widely across cultures and epochs. Some visions of justice have been entirely ethereal or otherworldly. Many, however, have been presented in the context of a physical utopia embodying , at least implicitly, a conception of justice. In fact, the rise of town planning as a professional and academic field in the nineteenth century was strongly propelled by the desire to shape a more just world through explicitly rational human interventions in the built environment. In this chapter, we explore the ways urban planning and social justice have been intertwined in the West during the modern period. We show that ideas about justice were an integral part of the principal utopian models that influenced planning from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. But we also see that the idea of social progress gradually became dissociated from physical plans for the built environment. The plans that were implemented lost their egalitarian content, while the emergent vision of activists concerned with justice turned away from physical answers to social questions . In their place, they developed theories of democratic processes that rejected the goal of a specific “outcome,” much less of an actual urban vision of the built environment and pattern of human settlement that would animate it. We find that these “talking cures” have always been flawed and inadequate. We conclude by arguing that just outcomes can and should be restored to planning concerns and can, to some extent, be specified. For us, 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 32 3/14/13 9:48 AM 33 Restoring Just Outcomes to Planning Concerns looking back for the future is no mere academic exercise; it is in fact essential to identifying the most virtuous goals of planning so that they can provide us with guidance in shaping a built environment for a more just world.1 The Utopian Moment in Town Planning The objectives of town planning have been multiple—defense, sanitation, transportation , religion, housing, economic production—and removing noxious neighborhoods and the people within them has long been claimed to benefit the poor as well as city aesthetics.2 Yet while “ideal” cities had been envisioned by Plato, Sir Thomas More, and Jonathan Edwards, to name but a few, it was the particular confluence of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and various forms of political democracy that gave birth in the West to the modern utopian vision of the just city—the city where the “common man” would be better off. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the industrial city—with its crowding, filth, and miserable poor—was seen by many reformers as not merely the form of the built environment that encompassed the working class and the destitute, the dangerous factory and the tenement house, disease and “immorality.” It was also regarded as the cause of much that was wrong with modern society: its extremes in economic inequality, its class conflict, its prostitution, and its loss of the traditional norms that bound people together (Ward 1989). The city itself had cut the masses off from their “natural” rural roots and from the benefits of the clean water and fresh air they once enjoyed. So it was no wonder that a new urban form was seen as necessary if there were to be genuine social re-form. Although the social forces that would implement this improved way of living needed to be found—variously , in an enlightened public, a government freed from corrupting politics, or the charitable inclinations of the wealthy—progress required a vision, a plan, a utopian alternative to the frightening dystopias places like New York, London, Paris, and Berlin had become. The most influential of these utopian “urban” visions can be found in the work of the English Ebenezer Howard, the American Frank Lloyd Wright, the German Bauhaus group, and the French Le Corbusier, who have arguably bestowed on us the essential models for how life is to be lived in real space.3 They were horrified by cities as they knew them, and conceived of their grand plans as offering a better, more equitable, more just life to the citizens of their new worlds. 13423-Policy Planning and People_Carmon1.indd 33 3/14/13 9:48 AM [18.222.163.31...

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