Neoliberalism and the City

It’s great to be here and, particularly, to celebrate the beginning of a journal with such an auspicious title. I have long been interested in questions of social justice; one of my first books was Social Justice and the City. For me, it was a revelatory book to write and I hope that it will one day be a revelatory book to read; but sometimes, as in this instance, you learn far more by writing than by reading. My book was about the city and I would like to start with one of my favourite quotations about cities, which is by Robert Park, a Sociologist writing in Chicago in the 1920s. Park put it this way about cities, he said: