Liberal theories of justice, such as John Rawls’ ‘justice as fairness’, seek to achieve a fair distribution of resources and opportunities between persons over their whole lives (Rawls, 1999). The ‘whole lives’ or ‘lifetime’ approach to thinking about justice may seem attractive when we are imagining ideal principles of justice that are fair to all persons. However, we should be aware that the kinds of injustice that people experience may vary across the life course. At different stages of the life course, we may have different needs and vulnerabilities, require different resources and be seeking different opportunities. For example, some of the needs of children tend to be quite different from the needs of working age adults. Similarly, some of the vulnerabilities of older people, in their 80s or 90s, may be quite different from the vulnerabilities of younger people in their 20s or 30s. If we want to understand injustice in the city and how it is (re-)produced, we need to pay careful attention to how cities affect people throughout the life course. We should not assume that justice requires ‘laws and rules that are blind to individual and group differences’ (Young, 1989: 250). So far, these issues have not received much attention by the main theorists of justice and the city.

The three chapters that make up this section examine aspects of injustice at three different points in the life course: among older people; in schools; and in the workplace. In Chapter 11, Rose Gilroy and Elizabeth Brooks examine older people's experience of social injustice. Their chapter draws on interviews with older people living in Newcastle. They use Iris Marion Young's account of oppression as a framework for thinking about how older people experience injustice. Gilroy and Brooks show the operation of exploitation, marginalisation, violence, powerlessness and cultural imperialism in the lives of older people in Newcastle. This exercise of seeing older people's experiences through the lens of Young's theory of oppression highlights the distinctive ways in which older people experience injustice in their everyday life. Often these experiences of everyday injustice are hidden from view.