Good Cities 3: Social Justice & the City
(London: Jason Hawkes Photography)
By Tim Thorlby
6 mins
This is the third blog in a series looking at what makes a ‘good city’. Taking the idea of a 15-minute city as a starting point this blog explores how greater fairness could be designed into our towns and cities.
1 – Introduction
What is a ‘good city’? What does it look like? Why should we care?
Given that over 80% of us live in towns and cities in the UK it is an important question.
The first blog in this four-part series introduced the idea of the ‘15-minute city’. I’m not suggesting that this provides a full answer to the question but I think it’s a good starting point. Each blog in this series is exploring one of the four features of the 15-minute city – proximity, ecology, fairness and democracy.
This third blog is looking at how our towns and cities have structures and patterns of unfairness embedded within them. It also looks forward to how this might be challenged.
2 – The 15-minute city, briefly
My first blog explained the ideas behind the 15-minute city and so I will just give a brief reminder here.
The ’15-minute city’ is a simple concept, drawing on longstanding ideas about what a ‘liveable’ city might look like. The idea is that in our towns and cities our daily requirements – work, shops, schools, healthcare, etc – should be easily reached within a 15-minute walk or bike ride. The aim is to make cities healthier, more environmentally sustainable and improve the quality of life for all residents, rich and poor. Some have described it as a ‘return to a local way of life’ with less long-distance commuting and less reliance on the car and a more decentralised city pattern. The aim is to spend less time commuting between places and more time actually in those places.
No-one is proposing that we demolish our urban areas and start again, or introduce draconian policies, so the challenge is to retro-fit such ideas onto existing places, which is why making it happen would require some creativity and time and no doubt move forward in fits and starts.
There are four dimensions to the 15-minute city which I am considering in turn in this series of blogs:
Proximity
Ecology
Solidarity (or fairness)
Participation (or democracy)
The rest of this blog will explore the third theme ‘solidarity’ and what this means in practice for a ‘good city’. I am taking solidarity to mean ‘fairness’ or ‘social justice’.
3 – Social justice in the city
I can still remember the first essay I had to write at university. It blew my young mind. I was asked to contemplate whether the social and economic forces at work in the 1970s constituted a paradigm shift for the UK and its cities. I was given a reading list with books like ‘Social Justice and the City’ by David Harvey and ‘City of Quartz’ by Mike Davies (“excavating the future!”) – good urban Marxists writing dense books full of urban theory. Heavy.
I struggled to make sense of it all at the time, (although I do remember being rather impressed at how cool Mike Davies looked, with his leather jacket and moody look amidst the concrete jungle of Los Angeles – more like a revolutionary than a professor.)
I also remember my young eyes being opened to the idea that our towns and cities are shaped not just by individual planning authorities, building firms or the whims of landowners but by much larger, deep-seated economic forces that push and pull at the fabric of our land like the enormous tides of the sea. There is a shape and a logic to how our city landscapes change over time and it is not random, nor just the actions of individuals but strongly influenced by the long-term choices which governments and societies make, and how that shapes the primal forces of the market. There are trends and patterns and trajectories. There is a shape to it.
One generation chooses to build public housing estates and establish new parks. The next generation leaves it to the market. Maybe less houses are built, and of different kinds and in different places. House prices rise, so the following generation sees lower income families priced out of the more desirable areas (‘gentrification’) and they congregate in new areas. The development of new railway stations or the demolition of old areas shifts the pattern of uses and the land values of surrounding areas. And so it goes, an ever changing urban tapestry, but with discernible patterns – causes and effects - for those who care to look.
I am not a Marxist, much as I admired Mike Davies’ leather jacket and strident pose. I don’t believe that the future trajectory of our economy is inevitable, I think it is amenable to change which is why I bother to think about it and write blogs.
I want to consider what ‘fairness’ in our cities means, on a structural scale. I want to explore the extent to which our city landscapes might be considered ‘fair’ and what the primary issues are.
4 – An example: how fair is the urban landscape of London?
At a simple level, in a 15-minute city each neighbourhood would have a mix of housing, public services and leisure and retail opportunities. Every neighbourhood will, of course, be different and have its own character and history, but the quality of life would be fundamentally similar in each one. This would, you might think, be the basis for a fairly designed city - where the location of your house doesn’t make a big difference to your life chances.
Is this how it is in the UK?
This question is too big for me to answer fully in one blog, but I am going to take London as one example for the UK and explore the question for this city.
Does the location of where you live in London make a big difference to your life chances?
I am going to look at two bits of evidence to answer this question.
4.1 - Exhibit A: Access to work
Our first piece of evidence is to look at the geography of work and how accessible it is to London’s millions of residents.
Given that nearly half of London’s residents don’t own a car (42% don’t), access to public transport is therefore very important for being able to access opportunities of any kind – work, schools, public services, shops, etc. So, does this vary much around the city?
Transport for London have mapped ‘public transport accessibility levels’ using detailed data – see Figure 1. This is a measure of how good your local public transport options are. The red colours are the areas with the best and most accessible public transport and the blue are the worst. As you can see on the map, there is a very clear pattern of difference from the centre of London outwards. Residents in the city centre and parts of inner London have great transport options, but the further out you go into the suburbs the more you will need to rely upon a car. If you don’t have one, you become pretty disadvantaged.
Unsurprisingly, car ownership is strongly related to household income, so if you live in outer London and have a low income, then you are unlikely to have a car and it will take you much longer to reach anywhere out of your immediate neighbourhood.
Figure 1: Public Transport Accessibility Levels
Source: Transport for London (accessed Nov 2023)
Contrast the map of public transport accessibility with the following map (in Figure 2) of where all of the jobs in London are (the map is a few years old, but the pattern has not changed much and its visual presentation is helpful).
Unsurprisingly, jobs are heavily concentrated in the centre of London and in a handful of hotspots further out. So, if you are unlucky enough to live in broad swathes of outer London and don’t own a car, then reaching areas with lots of jobs will be a difficult and time-consuming business for you.
Figure 2: Number of employees per square km in London (2014)
Source: GLA Economics (2016) Economic Evidence Base for London
This is a fairly classic city pattern, but it highlights a fundamental problem. London hasn’t developed into a city with a terribly fair geographical distribution of houses, jobs and services. The cheaper areas for housing (outer London) are more poorly served by public transport and are miles away from most of the jobs. If you can afford to live in the more central zones 1 or 2 though, you have public transport, access and jobs galore.
When I ran a cleaning company serving central London, most of our cleaners lived in outer London and came to work every day on the bus or train, often travelling for hours each day. Our inherited pattern of city development really doesn’t work well for them; it is fundamentally unfair.
But it is not inevitable.
Could we do this differently? Well, yes. Imagine if the businesses/jobs were not all concentrated in the centre, but more dispersed, with larger concentrations at various points in outer London – a more polycentric model of London. London already has some more sizeable sub-regional centres, like Croydon, so why not a few more? A mix of planning policies, transport investment and tax incentives could readily create more sub-regional centres of employment.
This would take us much closer to the practice of the 15-minute city, where you can more easily access all the things you need – work, shops, schools, etc – within your own neighbourhood or the next one along without having to travel for hours each day. The impact on quality of life would be huge – the time saved on the bus could be spent earning money instead or reclaimed for a better quality of life.
4.2 - Exhibit B: Who lives longer?
A second perspective on the overall shape of London as a city comes from looking at health inequalities.
In 2012, James Cheshire famously mapped life expectancy against the location of London’s tube stations[1]. Some striking patterns emerged.
For example, if you travel east on the Central Line from Lancaster Gate, in central London near Hyde Park, in just 20 minutes you find yourselves in Mile End in the heart of east London. In that 20 minute journey, the average life expectancy of the surrounding neighbourhood falls from a respectable 91 years to just 78 years; a fall of 13 years in life expectancy. As the author notes, the life trajectory of an average child is already strongly influenced before they are even born.
The point is not that some neighbourhoods are ‘healthier’ than others, although that is partly true, but more that the environmental quality, housing options, educational opportunities and many other factors in life vary quite significantly across London, as they do in most cities in the UK. This is the postcode lottery of life – children fortunate enough to be born in some areas will, on average, have more opportunities than those born in others. And house and rental prices help to ‘sort’ people into the neighbourhoods they can afford to live in, according to which ones offer better opportunities.
Tackling endemic health inequalities is not easy or straightforward as they reflect very fundamental social, economic and environmental factors. But for me they are one of the most important indicators of whether we are getting our urban areas ‘right’ or not. In this case, seriously not. Whilst areas will always differ and have very different characteristics and flavours (and rightly so), it surely cannot be right that whole communities are dying over a decade earlier than their counterparts a few miles away.
One of the advantages of adopting something like a 15-minute city lens is that it steps away from just focusing on city averages and looks at each and every neighbourhood and asks ‘is this good enough?’ It is quite clear that if the quality of housing, green spaces and fresh air and educational and work opportunities were distributed a little more evenly across our city then the kinds of disparities observed along the Central Line would, over time, begin to dissolve.
5 – Rethinking city design could promote social justice
Very few people would set their primary life goal as ‘spending more time on the bus’.
One of the core insights of the 15-minute city idea is that the quality of life for most people would be enhanced by arranging our towns and cities so that more of us are just a little closer to the things we want and can spend less time commuting. More time with our families, or more time earning money, or more time relaxing.
Mixing different kinds of uses together in each area of a city is not just about delivering environmental benefits, although there are many of these, as discussed in the last blog. Greater mixing delivers real social benefits too. And as we have seen in this blog, it could well play a significant role in making our towns and cities much fairer places to live.
By geographically distributing opportunities more evenly around the city and making them more accessible to more people, we could greatly reduce the postcode lottery of life.
By refusing to settle for blunt ‘city averages’ and looking at each neighbourhood or area in turn, we begin to affirm that every neighbourhood matters. The chances of designing a fairer city begin to increase.
6 – A theological perspective
I have written a fair amount on the importance of social justice within the UK, and the theological imperatives for this, so I will not repeat all of that here.
There is one thought I would like to reflect upon though, given our exploration of the ‘geography of unfairness’ across our cities; the challenge of mixed income neighbourhoods.
Our property market tends to ‘sort’ neighbourhoods by income – using house and rent prices. It is not neat and tidy, but as we have seen, clear patterns have developed, with leafy gentrified streets over here and concrete estates over there. Some of this is inevitable in a market economy, but we also get to choose how far to let it happen, and when to intervene. I think one of the key obstacles to developing a fairer city would be resistance to the idea of greater mixing of incomes within neighbourhoods. It is important to address this.
In the USA we can see an extreme example of what happens when the market drives urban planning and areas become radically (and often racially) sorted. It actually undermines the very fabric of society as different social groups become less and less connected. It’s much easier to believe myths about your neighbours when they live miles away and you never meet or see them. This is a grim future which I hope the UK can avoid.
It seems to me quite important that we actually value the mixing of different communities and income groups within our neighbourhoods; so that we have a chance to meet and get to know people who are different to ourselves. It not only makes for a fairer city but it is an investment in the fabric of society itself.
One of the simplest and most challenging injunctions we have is to ‘love our neighbour’. The parable that Jesus chose to illustrate this teaching was the Good Samaritan. This is a tale of a foreign visitor showing care for someone from a different ethnicity and of a different income group; they were not physical neighbours at all, yet this is the story we are told to illustrate neighbourliness. Rather more recently, Shane Claiborne has noted that is hard to love your neighbour when you don’t even know their name.
A Christian vision of a ‘good city’ has at its heart the idea that we build communities and neighbourhoods where rich and poor and people from different backgrounds have some connection and take some responsibility for each other. We don’t have to live in each other’s pockets, but neither are we to turn our backs on each other and pretend the others don’t exist. Ghettos for the rich or the poor or for anyone else are a weak answer to our urban challenges.
7 – Next time…
In the next and final blog in this series, I will take a closer look at the fourth theme of the 15-minute city – citizen participation (or democracy).
Thanks for reading!
This blog was written by Tim Thorlby. Please sign up for the free monthly email if you’d like to know about future blogs.
Notes
[1] For the original data and maps see: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1068/a45341