Spatial justice

Spatial justice links social justice to space, most notably in the works of geographers David Harvey and Edward W. Soja. The field analyzes the impact of regional planning and urban planning decisions. It is promoted by the scholarly tradition of critical geography, which arose in the 1970s.

Between issues of redistribution and decision-making processes
Building on the work of several famous Justice philosophers (John Rawls, 1971; Iris Marion Young, 1990, 2000), two contrasting approaches of justice have polarized the debate: one focuses on redistribution issues, the other concentrates on decision-making processes.

A first set of approaches consists in asking questions about spatial or socio-spatial distributions and working to achieve an equal geographical distribution of society's wants and needs, such as job opportunities, access to health care, good air quality, et cetera. This is of particular concern in regions where the population has difficulty moving to a more spatially just location due to poverty, discrimination, or political restrictions (such as apartheid pass laws). Even in free, developed nations, access to many places are limited. Geographer Don Mitchell points to the mass privatization of once-public land as a common example of spatial injustice. In this distributive justice perspective, the access to material and immaterial goods, or to social positions indicates whether the situation is fair or not. At the scale of urban space, questions of accessibility, walkability and transport equity can also be seen as matters of distribution of spatial resources.

Another way of tackling the concept of spatial justice is to focus on decision-making procedures: this approach also raises issues of representations of space, of territorial or other identities and of social practices. For instance, focusing on minorities allows to explore their spatial practices but also to investigate how these are experienced and managed by various agents: this may lead to reveal forms of oppression or discrimination that a universalist approach might disregard otherwise. Architect and urbanist Liz Ogbu argues, for instance, that successful spatial justice planning requires designers to "engage people who don’t have a seat at the table and think about them as co-designers in the process".

Environmental justice
Environmental justice is a related concept, arising in the 1970s in North American cities. It criticizes the concentration of pollution and natural hazards disproportionately in minority neighborhoods, which is seen by proponents as a form of racial discrimination.