Spatial Justice - Spatial Justice Between Issues of Redistribution and Decision-making Processes

Spatial Justice Between Issues of Redistribution and Decision-making Processes

The concept of Spatial Justice opens up several perspectives for social sciences. 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.

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. In sum, depending on the chosen approach, either questions are asked about spatial distributions because justice is evaluated from “results”, or questions are asked about space representations, (spatial or not) identities and experiences because justice is defined as a process. Spatial justice stands as a unifying concept for the social sciences: its coherence stems from a reflection on the modalities of the political decision-making and on the policies implemented in order to improve spatial distributions.