Changing Ideas and Practices for Making Cities Fair

Kapuscinski Development Lecture

Lecture

This lecture traces the divergent and contradictory intellectual and practice based traditions that the notion of fairness in the city implies, including the work on urban equity, justice, redistribution, the public good and the good city.

Abstract

Starting with questions about what an increasingly urban world implies for fairness at the national or global scale in the 21st century, the geographical reference points for this investigation of “fair cities” are both northern and southern urban places.

This lecture traces the divergent and contradictory intellectual and practice based traditions that the notion of fairness in the city implies, including the work on urban equity (rights, opportunity, access, affordability); justice (electoral; procedural, distributional, enforcement and); redistribution (urban welfare and post conflict); the public good and the good city.

The central point is to demonstrate that ideas and practices about fairness in the city vary over time and space and that while there is appropriate concern about rising exclusion and the withdrawal of social protection in some centres, typically older more affluent cities, from new urban nodes, largely in the global south, there are counter tendencies and new innovations that support the utopian aspiration that cities will provide a better future for the millions of new residents that will call them home over the decades to come.

Susan Parnell

Professor Susan Parnell

Professor Susan Parnell is an urban Geographer in the Department of
Environmental and Geographical Sciences and is the Director of the
‘CityLab’ at the University of Cape Town (UCT) African Centre for Cities.

About the Kapuscinski Development Lectures

Top global thinkers from around the world deliver lectures on development in European Union countries. The series “Kapuscinski development lectures” is jointly organized by the European Commission, the United Nations Development Programme and this year hosted by the University of Amsterdam.

GSSS Summer Institute on Global Poverty and Inclusive Development

The Kapuscinski Development Lecture will be the highlight of the Summer Institute on Global Poverty and Inclusive Development. This one-week course for development researchers and professionals will address new theories on the dynamics of poverty and shed new light on the promotion of more inclusive development trajectories. Professor Susan Parnell will give a master class exclusively for the Summer Institute students.

More information and registration

For more information and registration, please visit the Kapuscinski lectures' website.

Published by  GSSS