What can urban policies and planning really learn from John Rawls? Institutions and the just city

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This article critically rediscusses John Rawls’s theory of justice from the point of view of planning, in an attempt to contribute to the debate on normative planning theory. After criticising the incorrect way in which the Rawlsian perspective has often been imported into planning theory and practice, it highlights two of Rawls’s crucial (meta-theoretical) insights which are instead usually not considered: the idea of the basic structure, and that of background justice. Taking these two ideas seriously suggests that, in planning, we need a multi-strata view of institutional action and a canvas conception of the just city. This implies that any substantive theory of the just city should satisfy at least six (meta-theoretical) requirements: (i) the no-flatness clause, (ii) the no-isomorphism clause, (iii) the no-exhaustiveness clause, (iv) the anti-contingency clause, (v) the open-endedness clause, (vi) the anti-adhocness clause. These six conditions may be interpreted as a reformulation of the classic ideal of the “rule of law” in relation to just city issues. In light of all of this, an interesting point is the opportunity to shift the planning discourse from the very much debated, but less crucial, distinction between “processes” and “outcomes” to the more important contrast identified here between “background justice” and “allocative justice”, which is the real point in urban matters as well. In short, we cannot but agree that outcomes must be taken into account when pondering on urban justice (this is not yet an issue): but the real questions is what kinds of outcome matter, and how they should be taken into consideration.

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