为什么会有这么多糟糕的城市设计?我们怎样才能使我们的街道更欢迎每个人?完美的城市仅仅是海市蜃楼吗?在本周的节目中，我们将探讨街道是否会有歧视，以及我们如何设计我们的城市，使它们更加公正。

城市在各种方面都不公平。Many are still segregated because ofredlining, where the government deliberately denied loans to black families in order to keep them out of white neighborhoods. Homeless people struggle withhostile architecture这是故意设计的，防止他们躺下休息。Many poor people live infood deserts, neighborhoods where they can’t access healthy and affordable groceries. Even though the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed 30 years ago,many buildings remain inaccessibleto disabled people.

What should we do about this? One simple idea is that we should hire some architects to design the ideal city, then build it. But figuring out how to implement this plan is staggeringly complex!

The ideal city might just be beyond our reach. If a measure is good for people, but bad for business, it will be hard to pass. Sometimes, everyone agrees that an improvement is great in principle, but homeowners balk at having it in their own backyards; this is often true of needle exchanges, metro lines, sewage treatment plants… even affordable housing. Why envision an ideal if you can never attain it in practice?

Idealists might reply that it’s important to have something to work toward, even if you never achieve it. But there are other problems. How can any small group of architects know what an ideal city looks like? They might get tangled in their own ignorance and prejudice, ignoring crucial possibilities. For example, they might try to invent a perfectly efficient road system, forgetting that public transportation is more affordable and better for the environment. Or they might design a bunch of single-family homes, without even considering the possibility of communal living.

Architects could try to solve the problem by asking diverse groups of city stakeholders what they want. But then a new problem arises: how will they balance everybody’s concerns? If a city needs affordable housing, public transit, beautiful parks, desegregated neighborhoods, and environmentally-friendly design, how will they know what to prioritize? They’ll either need to adopt a systematic theory, or find some other way of settling disagreements.

One last problem with building toward the ideal city is that our current cities have non-ideal features that are costly to dismantle. Highways that were built to destroy black neighborhoods, or cut them off from the rest of the city,still exist today. In an ideal world, they would never have been built in the first place, but dismantling them is expensive to taxpayers and bad for the environment. (If a piece of architecture is still causing serious present-day injustice, destroying and replacing it might be worth the cost, but we’ll need to weigh the trade-offs.)

So, what does urban justice look like? I’m looking forward to gaining a clearer vision in this week’s discussion with guest Shane Epting.

Photo byShengpengpeng CaionUnsplash