David R. Reynolds

Procedural justice and local democracy

Abstract Contemporary research on American local government has generally emphasized its role in public service provision. However, evidence that the provision of services has become increasingly characterized by locational conflict has led many geographers and other social scientists to question theory. Critical examination of the theory of American local democracy illustrates inconsistency stemming from its failure to distinguish a theory of government from a theory of electoral process. Our critical examination of this theory suggests that local democratic institutions must be operated and implemented in a manner consistent with a concept of social justice that is derived from societal knowledge and conditions yet is immune from influence by state institutions. This view implies that the achievement of procedural justice is of paramount importance in the reform of local state institutions. It is argued that a methodology modified from the public choice theory of constitutions but not implying an a priori conception of social justice can contribute effectively to empirical knowledge of what constitutes justice in procedure. In the last half of the paper, this methodology is applied experimentally to the resolution of two local state conflicts of contemporary importance: urban school budget retrenchment and water management. The results confirm that achieving procedural justice is indeed of central importance in the resolution of these conflicts and suggest what might constitute appropriate standards of procedural justice in these contexts.

The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Right to the City. By Don Mitchell

Don Mitchell begins The Right to the City by suggesting that public spaces in the contemporary American city typically engender fear: fear of the homeless, drug users, loitering youths, and political activists. While the right to private property secures spaces of commerce and habitation for the bourgeoisie, the poor and those without property often have no recourse but literally to inhabit public spaces. The result, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, is that public spaces appear disorderly and in need of regulation if anarchy is to be avoided. Drawing on Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, Mitchell asks who has the right to the city and its public spaces? How is that right determined both in law and in the streets? How is it policed and legitimized by the state? How has its legitimacy been upheld or undermined historically? Finally, how can struggles over the exercise of this right give form and substance to a progressive conception of social justice? Although many of Mitchell’s arguments are applicable to all contemporary cities, this is primarily an exploration of public space in the American city. The theoretical framework that Mitchell develops in Chapter 1 contributes significantly to the burgeoning literature in geography and elsewhere that explores Lefebvre’s idea of the right to the city. Like Lefebvre, Mitchell argues that the right to inhabit the city implies the right to housing and all that it necessarily entails. Although securing the right to housing is no guarantee that a fuller appropriation of the use values of city life by its inhabitants will follow, it is a necessary first step. This right must also be disassociated from the right to private property if urban space is to accommodate the everyday needs of urban inhabitants, rather than the needs of capital accumulation. Other rights, particularly the right to representation, from which the rights of free speech and of assembly derive, are also of critical importance in Mitchell’s formulation. Where Mitchell departs from Lefebvre and many other scholars on the Left is in positing that struggles to secure these and other rights actually produce spaces of representation in which demands for the right to the city and social justice become visible. The visibility (even spectacle) of struggle is crucial in spurring recognition of the legitimacy of such demands by the state. For Mitchell, the liberal state remains a significant (perhaps the most significant) actor in institutionalizing rights to protect the weak. When translated into law, rights become social practices that are backed up and enforced by the state. Chapter 2 provides an historical perspective and veracity to this formulation by examining how specific social struggles over rights to urban public space have led to transformations of laws of public space as courts have sought to adjudicate or eliminate conflict. Mitchell reviews two recent U.S. Supreme Court cases involving the rights to the city of two different groups: women who seek abortions and anti-abortion protesters outside abortion clinics and the homes of providers of abortions. Ironically, the decisions in these cases drew on a long history of case law that had more to do with controlling the dissent of workers than with regulating the sort of dissent that is exercised by anti-abortion protesters. Mitchell traces this history from its origins in struggles over the rights of the Industrial Workers of the World to speak on the streets from about 1910 to 1939, when the Supreme Court finally codified the right to speak in public spaces. But, as Mitchell makes clear, this ruling has not stopped innumerable jurisdictions from restricting or even eliminating that right. This point is brought out most #1753—ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY—VOL. 80 NO. 4—80406-reynolds_br

Urban Schools: The New Social Spaces of Resistance

tion and its struggles over race and class. Similarly, although Pulido (correctly) critiques the Third World Left for failing to theoretically (and practically) examine the articulation of gender with race and class within capitalism, she also takes it to task for failing to ‘‘appreciate’’ gender and sexuality ‘‘on their own terms,’’ which, oddly, led to gender being ‘‘abstracted from everyday life’’ (p. 195). Perhaps these contradictions between articulation, relative autonomy, and abstraction were crucial to how gender was understood and lived within the movement, but Pulido does not treat them as contradictions but rather as a ‘‘lack of awareness’’ (p. 195). Such a claim is analytically insufficient and historically anachronistic, attributing to activists a lack that is only visible because of the long, later history of struggle over gender and sexuality that arose, in part precisely because such activists had to learn (through struggle) how to ‘‘appreciate,’’ or, really, understand, the contradictions of gender and sexuality in their articulated complexity. It is customary to end a review like this by saying, ‘‘but these quibbles aside. . .’’ But these are not quibbles; they are in fact crucially important theoretical and practical problems, and it is very much to Pulido’s credit for raising them within the context of such a powerful and enlightening book. They are exactly the sorts of issues, Pulido shows, that geographers and other progressive scholars are actively engaged in debating and theorizing, and their salience is every bit as important now, among those millions marching for immigrant rights or those other, perhaps more quiet, millions working, as many of Pulido’s informants are, in community organizations dedicated to the ongoing struggle against capitalist imperialism at home (e.g., manifest in appalling rates of mortality among men of color, chronic food insecurity even in the wealthiest cities, or continued gender oppression). Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left is a crucial book at a critical time. It helps make clear why this turn among geographers and others toward understanding the historical geography of earlier moments of radicalism is not just an exercise in political nostalgia, but is vitally important for understanding how we must move forward, and what resources are available to do so.