Giving Cities the Shape of Justice
There’s a joke online that I love because it rings so true: “I wish I was the person I thought I could be… when I bought all this produce.” If you’ve ever worked in urban planning, you know that feeling. Cities are built on optimism. (See my November 3rd blog on Delusional Optimism.)
Urban planners have the audacity of imagining better worlds. We have the stubborn belief that streets, homes, parks, and public spaces can shape not only how we live—but who we become.
But optimism is not naïveté. (At least, I like to think so.) City planning has always been a way of asking: What kind of world do we want to build, and who gets to belong in it?
Giving Love to the Messy City
(Tip o’ the hat again to the wonderful new book Messy Cities!)
What if the worn benches and high maintenance costs don’t signal dysfunction, but deep use? What if a “messy” public space is, in fact, the beating heart of a just city?
The work of justice is learning to see beyond our own vantage point—and recognizing that inclusion rarely looks tidy.
A Short History of How Cities Reflect Our Values
If you want to understand a society, look at how it builds its cities. Across cultures and centuries, urban design has expressed everything from spiritual ideals to military necessity, economic ambition, colonial control, and aesthetic philosophy. You’ll find cities shaped by divine proportion, fortified for defence, organized around temples, designed around factories, or built to symbolize the power of an empire.
And yet, woven through all that—through ruins, street grids, back alleys, plazas, and neighbourhoods—you can trace one constant: a human longing to connect and to find meaning in place.
The story of modern city planning also contains a darker layer. When the profession emerged in the late 1800s, it was responding to horrific conditions: poisoned water, smoke-choked air, factories abutting tenements, firetraps with no daylight or ventilation, rampant disease, and whole neighbourhoods with life expectancies cut in half. Reformers fought for public regulations and for a new cadre of public servants who would protect people from the worst predatory excesses of industrial capitalism. Their efforts saved lives.
Yet many planning tools that improved safety also embedded harm. Zoning, in particular, became—as Simon Fraser University’s Andy Yan puts it—“a bludgeon of colonialism.” It formalized exclusion. It segmented cities by class and race. It reinforced patterns of segregation and normalized the stilted, compartmentalized, single-use landscapes that came to dominate North America.
Jane Jacobs would later argue that this fragmentation stripped away the complexity and diversity that make cities thrive—the “small, the various and the personal.” So let’s say yes to safety and ‘messiness,’ and no to exclusion and monotony. How can we do that?
Defining the Just City
A just city is one where:
Affordable housing exists for every income bracket.
Public spaces are vibrant, safe, and welcoming to all cultures and ages.
Transit connects rather than divides.
Parks and plazas are accessible, loved, and shared.
People see themselves reflected in the city’s design, leadership, and public life.
Justice is tactile. It shows up in who feels welcome in a plaza. Who can afford to stay in a neighbourhood. Who gets to breathe clean air. Who has access to nature and to possibility.
What We Can Do Now
Building more equitable cities doesn’t require heroics. It requires attention and participation.
Show up to public hearings.
Ask who benefits—and who is left out.
Advocate for more housing, not less.
Support mixed-income neighbourhoods.
Champion public spaces that welcome difference, not just comfort.
Question narratives that equate “safety” with homogeneity or tidiness.
Talk to your neighbours, even the ones outside your bubble.
Cities evolve in the direction of the people who show up for them.
Most importantly, expand your sense of neighbourhood. Connect with the people who share your bus stop, your sidewalk, your local park bench.
Community thrives at the scale of everyday encounters.
The Work of Giving Cities The Shape of Justice
Urban planning is, above all, an invitation. It asks all of us to participate in shaping the future of our neighbourhoods and cities—their stories, their possibilities, their collective destiny.
We each have a role in giving cities the shape of justice. And the work is not abstract. It starts right outside our doors, in the places where we meet one another, challenge one another, and choose—again and again—to build something better together.
City planners have long been dreamers. Some of us are visionaries; some are zealots (and I say that as a compliment); some are nose-to-the-site-plan reformers trying to save lives and to make the world a better place. But all of us, in our own way, are trying to answer the same question:
What should a city be?
