Class, Spatial Justice and the Production of Not-Quite Citizens

Abstract

If the archetypal good citizen is middle class, it is important to explore what enables some people to fit the bill, while others are prevented from doing so, even if they wanted to. This chapter draws on individual life histories — narrated mainly, but not exclusively, by working-class people -to explore the structural processes behind persistent class inequality and spatial injustice in the context of contemporary Britain, as it (apparently) emerges from the Great Recession. I use the framework developed by US feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young, which she called the five faces of oppression (Young, 1990), together with insights from a later work that drew attention both to society’s responsibility for justice and to the possibilities for individual agency (Young, 2011). I connect these to calls for spatial justice emerging from the Right to the City movement.