In the 1960s and 1970s, social justice was at the forefront of deliberations about urban policy in the U.S. The glaring injustices of Jim Crow laws were still fresh in people's minds. Poor and minority citizens were organizing against the “federal bulldozer” that was destroying their neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal. In the nation's capitol, in the press, and in city halls and civic associations throughout the United States, a wide-ranging debate about inequality and racial hierarchy — a debate about justice — took the American metropolis as its subject. Half a centurylater, unjust conditions are still widespread in American cities. But our discourse has changed. Urban policy debates are driven overwhelmingly by economic considerations–by concerns about efficient production and service provision and, above all, by concerns about competitiveness in an increasingly globalized economy.We argue in this paper that the inequalities and hierarchies that characterize countless urban and inner-ring suburban communities throughout the United States are unjust according to a wide range of competing normative theories, including Marxist and post-Marxist accounts of justice, Rawlsian liberalism, communitarianism, and even philosophical libertarianism. Normative discourse about urban and suburban inequality has declined nevertheless, our claim is, because America's metropolitan regions embody what we call thick injustice. American cities and their suburbs are increasingly characterized by injustices that are deep and densely concentrated, as well as opaque and relatively intractable. We suggest it is the historical roots of metropolitan injustice, its relation to the structure of local governance in the United States, and its imbrication with physical place that render it so difficult to see, and hence to change
