Introduction

More than half of the world's population live in cities. Many of those people live in grinding poverty while some enjoy unimaginable wealth. The juxtaposition of extreme wealth and poverty in a single city might be surprising but for the fact that such radical inequalities are a common feature of almost all cities. Moreover, economic inequality is just one among many types of radical inequalities including, for example, life expectancy, health, education, mobility, access to services and social capital, and treatment by authorities. Many of us believe that some – perhaps, many – of these inequalities are unfair or unjust. However, justice and fairness are not simple or uncontested concepts. Neither is the ‘city’. So, there is theoretical – analytical and normative – work to be done to move, first, from the empirical claim that there are inequalities to the moral claim that there are injustices, and second, from the conception of the city as a physical space and a container of (in)justices, to its understanding as a social and political space that is actively reproducing (in)justices. In this book, we bring together researchers from various disciplines and theoretical perspectives to ‘look for’ (in)justices in and of the city.

This chapter provides some theoretical background, explains our focus on one particular city and outlines the structure of the book. In the first section, we introduce the ideas of justice and fairness. We begin with liberal formulations of justice and briefly review key debates among liberals and between liberals and their critics. In the second section, we turn our attention to justice and fairness in and of the city by drawing on theories of spatial justice. Our aim is to situate debates about justice in and of the city in the broader context of debates about conceptualisation of justice. We conclude this section by arguing for a multi-disciplinary and pluralistic approach to thinking about justice, a relational approach to the city and a dialectic understanding of spatial justice. We suggest that this is an important first step toward bridging the gaps between different disciplinary perspectives on social and spatial justice and fairness. In the third section, we explain why this book focuses on a single city, Newcastle upon Tyne, and provide a short introduction to our city. Finally, we briefly set out the structure and content of the book.