Fainstein’s The Just City is written against the background of almost 40 years of neoliberal economy and growing different forms of inequalities in major world cities. In my opinion, this book should be reviewed by considering almost four decades of Fainstein’s involvement with planning, especially her political and intellectual project. In the first two decades of her academic life, she presented her position as a political scientist and an urban analyst and gradually became a planning theorist. Since the early 1990s, she has been contributing continuously to planning theory and theorizing about cities. As illustrated by her previous publications, equity and social justice are the main themes of her research and the main concerns in her academic life. For example, in Urban Political Movements (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1974), she linked the perception of injustice by deprived groups with social and political movements in the US cities of the 1960s. Similarly, The View From Below (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1972) suggests that changes in public policy in regard to equity happen through political pressure from the bottom half of the society, which aims at political accountability of governmental institutions to their clients. Later, as she admitted in an interview with Aalbers (2004), she shifted her concerns toward a broader normative framework, which goes beyond the effects of grassroots, to create a condition of what she refers in The Just City as ‘‘nonreformist reforms directed at improving the lives of the residents of cities . . . and redirect[ ing] practitioners from their obsession with economic development to a concern with social equity’’ (p. 19).

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