American Cities and American Political Science—a Look at Thick Injustice

The back cover of Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom's Justice and the American Metropolis concisely lays out a central challenge of contemporary politics: “Today's American cities and suburbs are the sites of ‘thick injustice’—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.” The fact that the topic of “urban politics” is not a major theme of political science scholarship both reflects and exacerbates this challenge. And so we have decided to invite a diverse group of social scientists to discuss the book in light of the very big question that it poses: How do American cities look when assessed in terms of their “justice” (or “injustice”), and how might they look if they were assessed in these terms more seriously? In considering this question, discussants have also been asked to consider a related question: How does American political science look when assessed in terms of the extent to which it takes the question of urban justice and injustice seriously?—Jeffrey C. Isaac, Editor