Reconciling the Just and Sustainable City in the Era of Just Transition: A Review of Urban Visions

Just transition occupies an increasingly important place in political agendas from global to local levels. In recent years, this concept has evolved from a reactive social project aimed at protecting industrial workers affected by environmental regulations to a proactive social-ecological project aimed at simultaneously reducing social inequalities and environmental degradation. This ambition of bridging social justice and sustainability objectives is particularly relevant for the urban context, where social and environmental issues tend to concentrate and intertwine. However, questions of what a just and sustainable city could and should look like remain largely unexplored. While there exist several urban visions that centre social justice (most notably Susan Fainstein’s “Just City”), sustainability issues are not central to these visions. At the same time, it remains unclear whether and how urban visions that do focus on sustainability (e.g. sustainable cities, eco-cities, green cities, low-carbon cities.) consider social justice concerns. This research has two main goals: first, to identify and analyse the role of sustainability in the prominent just city visions and, second, to examine visions of sustainable cities and their conceptualization of justice. The research is based on an analysis of several seminal texts on just cities and sustainable city visions. The visions are analysed through a framework that highlights considerations of distributional, procedural and recognition-based justice. By analysing the place of sustainability within just city visions and the place of social justice in sustainable city visions, we give direction to and open discussion about the contours of possible just and sustainable urban futures.