Exploring the Just City: Equity in Urban Planning

Why do some neighbourhoods get gleaming metro lines, manicured parks, and reliable water supply, while others a few kilometres away struggle with open drains and irregular electricity? Urban planning is never neutral. Every decision about where to build, what to demolish, and who gets housed reflects a set of values. The Just City is a theory that puts one value at the centre of all these decisions: fairness. Developed by urban planning scholar Susan Fainstein, it argues that planners should judge their work first and foremost by whether it produces equitable outcomes for everyone, especially those who are usually left out.

Defining the just city 🔗

The Just City is an advocacy-driven approach to urban planning. Instead of treating cities mainly as engines of economic growth, it treats them as places where justice should be the primary measure of success. Fainstein built this idea over two decades of research and laid it out fully in her 2010 book, The Just City. Her central claim is direct: planners need a normative theory of justice because their enthusiasm for diversity and growth has not produced real alternatives to inequality.

Fainstein rests her theory on three principles: equity, diversity, and democracy. Equity means that public investment and benefits should be distributed fairly, with particular attention to those who have less. Diversity means that cities should accommodate different groups, lifestyles, and uses of space rather than pushing everyone toward a single mould. Democracy means that the people affected by planning decisions should have a genuine say in them. The just city is the one where all three of these are taken seriously together.

To develop this framework, Fainstein drew on the work of philosophers such as John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, and Nancy Fraser. None of them wrote primarily about cities, but each offered useful building blocks for thinking about fairness. Fainstein took these ideas and applied them to the concrete problems planners face on the ground.

One contrast makes the theory easy to grasp. Fainstein sets the just city against what she calls the city as a growth machine, where development is driven mainly by the interests of property developers, investors, and political elites chasing economic expansion. In the growth-machine model, fairness is an afterthought, something that might trickle down later. In the just city, fairness is the starting point.

Why a theory of justice is needed 🔗

For much of the twentieth century, improving conditions for disadvantaged communities was a central goal of urban planning. Over the past few decades, that focus shifted. Cities began competing aggressively to attract investment, and planning departments became preoccupied with economic development. Fainstein argues that this shift left planners without a clear moral compass. They could measure how competitive a city was, but they had no agreed way to judge whether it was fair.

This matters a great deal in the Indian context. Urban inclusivity here is often described as a paradox. Despite a long list of government schemes, policy frameworks, and financial mechanisms aimed at equitable housing, low-income households are frequently pushed to the peripheries of cities while wealthier areas absorb the bulk of infrastructure and amenities. A theory like the Just City gives us a vocabulary to name this problem and a standard against which to measure it.

Radical participation and who governs the city 🔗

The most distinctive feature of the Just City approach is how it treats participation. Many planning theories support consulting the public, but the Just City pushes further. It calls for a model often described as radical participation, where civil society does not just give feedback but actively shapes and drives policy.

This is a real departure from the standard practice of stakeholder involvement. In a typical planning process, a government agency or private developer makes a proposal and then invites residents to comment on it. People can voice concerns, but the basic decisions have already been made. Radical participation flips this sequence. It treats civil society leadership as central, with community organisations and ordinary citizens holding primary authority over urban policy rather than being consulted at the end.

Stakeholder involvement versus civil society governance 🔗

The difference is worth spelling out. Stakeholder involvement usually means that government, developers, and a few selected community representatives sit at the table together, but power remains concentrated with the formal authorities. Civil society governance, by contrast, aims to redistribute that power. It actively transfers decision-making authority away from traditional power centres toward groups that have historically been marginalised.

This approach also takes a different view of conflict. Consensus-driven planning tries to smooth over disagreements and get everyone to agree. The Just City recognises that meaningful change often requires confronting entrenched interests rather than seeking comfortable agreement at any cost. When a wealthy lobby and a slum community have genuinely opposed interests, pretending they can all be satisfied equally usually means the weaker side loses quietly.

The reasoning behind this is practical, not just idealistic. Residents of a neighbourhood, particularly those from marginalised communities, hold detailed knowledge about their own areas that professional planners may simply not have. A water engineer may not know which lanes flood every monsoon, but the people who live there do. Putting those residents in charge of decisions, rather than merely surveying them, is meant to produce better and fairer plans.

Participatory budgeting as a working example 🔗

A concrete tool helps illustrate radical participation: participatory budgeting. This is a democratic process in which community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget. Instead of officials allocating funds and then announcing the results, residents identify, discuss, and prioritise spending projects themselves.

What makes participatory budgeting powerful is the timing of public involvement. In conventional consultations, feedback comes at the end of a process, when it is least able to change anything. In participatory budgeting, residents shape projects from the very beginning. The process typically runs through stages: a steering committee that represents the community designs the rules, residents brainstorm ideas, proposals are developed, and then the community votes on what to fund. Cities have used this method to direct money toward affordable housing and other equity goals.

Pune was among the early Indian cities to experiment with participatory budgeting, allowing residents to suggest local works to be included in the municipal budget. Experiences like this show both the promise of the idea and the difficulty of sustaining genuine citizen power once it meets the machinery of municipal administration.

Participation in the Indian setting 🔗

India offers a complicated landscape for this kind of participation. The classic reference point for thinking about citizen involvement is Arnstein’s 1969 ladder of citizen participation, which ranges from tokenism at the bottom to real citizen control at the top. Pushing participation up that ladder requires institutional, legislative, and political support at every level of governance.

That support has often been thin. Urban participation in India has long been shaped by outdated laws and limited backing from the state, which has slowed development work and weakened genuine community involvement. The 74th Constitutional Amendment, which created urban local bodies and mandated structures like ward committees, was meant to bring governance closer to citizens. In practice, the degree to which these bodies actually empower residents varies widely from city to city. The Just City framework gives us a way to ask a sharper question of these institutions: do they merely consult, or do they genuinely transfer power?

Key debates and tensions 🔗

The Just City is an influential theory, but it is not without serious challenges. The biggest of these concern the difficulty of pursuing equity within a capitalist economy.

Equity versus economic growth 🔗

Fainstein is clear that her just cities are meant to be achievable within a global capitalist political economy, not in some imagined post-capitalist future. This is both a strength and a vulnerability. It makes the theory practical, but it also means equity goals must constantly compete with the logic of markets and growth.

Market forces, left alone, tend to reproduce and deepen existing inequalities. Land in well-served areas becomes expensive, pushing the poor out. The Just City therefore argues for deliberate interventions, even when these conflict with profit maximisation or efficiency. Fainstein’s own policy recommendations reflect this. For instance, she argues that affordable housing units should remain permanently affordable or be replaced one-for-one, so that they are not simply lost to the market over time.

The tension is real. A municipality that depends on real estate development for revenue and jobs has a strong incentive to favour high-value projects over affordable housing. Asking that same municipality to prioritise equity is asking it to act against some of its own financial interests. This is the central practical difficulty the theory must navigate. As one analysis of Indian urban policy put it, city-making is ultimately about the exercise of power and about the powerful deciding how others get to live.

The problem of representation 🔗

Handing power to civil society sounds fair, but it raises hard questions about who actually gets represented. Community organisations and advocacy groups do not always speak for everyone in a neighbourhood. A well-organised, often better-off group can dominate a participatory process and crowd out quieter or more vulnerable voices.

There is a particular irony here. A determined neighbourhood association might successfully block a proposed affordable housing project in its area, citing community wishes. This demonstrates community power, the very thing the Just City wants to encourage, yet it can also entrench the kind of exclusion the theory aims to fight. Genuine participation does not automatically produce just outcomes.

Unequal capacity to participate 🔗

Closely linked is the problem of unequal capacity. The ability to take part meaningfully in planning is not evenly distributed. Affluent residents typically have more time, education, professional connections, and confidence in dealing with officials. Working people juggling long hours and unstable incomes have far less of all of these. When participation is opened up without addressing this gap, it can quietly hand more influence to those who already have the most. The challenge for planners is to design processes that actively support participation from marginalised groups, rather than assuming an open door is enough.

Balancing the three principles 🔗

Finally, equity, diversity, and democracy do not always pull in the same direction. They can sit in tension with one another. A democratic majority might vote for something that harms a minority, putting democracy at odds with diversity. A push for equity through large-scale public housing might clash with a community’s democratic wish to preserve its existing character. Fainstein herself acknowledges that these principles are not easy to combine, and she places particular weight on equity and diversity where democratic processes alone might fall short. Real planning involves weighing these values against each other case by case, which is why the Just City is a framework for judgement rather than a fixed formula.

What do you think? If you were given the power to redesign how decisions are made in your own city, would you trust ordinary residents to govern planning directly, even knowing that the loudest or best-organised groups might dominate? And in a country where municipalities depend heavily on real estate for revenue, how far do you think equity can realistically be pushed before economic pressures pull it back?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Fainstein
2. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801446559/the-just-city/
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-cities/articles/10.3389/frsc.2025.1602317/full
4. https://socio.health/urbanization-and-urban-development-challenges/just-city-planning-equity-participation-urban-development/
5. https://www.nahro.org/journal_article/how-participatory-budgeting-can-create-affordable-housing-and-a-just-economy/
6. https://yourcommonwealth.org/social-development/inclusive-and-participatory-urban-economies-the-indian-context/
7. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8484648
8. https://www.planetizen.com/node/50215
9. https://www.freepressjournal.in/analysis/urban-planning-in-india-cannot-be-free-of-either-political-or-economic-ideology