Justice and the Spatial Imagination (original) (raw)
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Spatial justice: A fundamental or derivative notion?
City, culture and society, 2024
The concept of “spatial justice” is widely employed in the contemporary academic literature and public debates. This concept is usually deemed decisive for a radical change in urban policies and planning. However, there is no agreed definition of what spatial justice is. This happens also because the idea, despite obtaining immediate and extensive success, still lacks some necessary conceptual and analytical explorations and clarifications. This article critically revisits the idea itself of “spatial justice”. To do so, it makes three preliminary specifications in regard to: the primary subject of justice; the distinction between the general concept of justice and specific substantive conceptions of justice; the circumscribed meaning of the notion of distributive justice as a mere component of the more general notion of social justice. Further specifications follow on the issue of “space” itself. Against this background, the article discusses five cases in which space is effectively involved in justice issues: as an influencing factor; as a unit of allocation; as a privately owned asset; as a public domain; as a precinct. The article concludes by arguing that the notion of “spatial justice” is derivative rather than foundational.
Justice et injustices spatiales, 2000
The specific term "spatial justice" has not been commonly used until very recently, and even today there are tendencies among geographers and planners to avoid the explicit use of the adjective "spatial" in describing the search for justice and democracy in contemporary societies. Either the spatiality of justice is ignored or it is absorbed (and often drained of its specificity) into such related concepts as territorial justice, environmental justice, the urbanization of injustice, the reduction of regional inequalities, or even more broadly in the generic search for a just city and a just society 1. All of these variations on the central theme are important and relevant, but often tend to draw attention away from the specific qualities and meaning of an explicitly spatialized concept of justice and, more importantly, the many new opportunities it is providing not just for theory building and empirical analysis but for spatially informed social and political action. I hope I have been of some help in explaining why, after thirty or so years of relative neglect Lefebvre's passionate ideas about le droit à la ville have been so actively revived.
A process of disagreement on Spatial Justice
This article is composed of an original text, written in the winter of 2013, and a postscript, which I wrote two years later. The older element was produced for an EDAR doctoral school devoted to academic disagreement (Lévy, 2014) and deploys two critiques of Jacques Lévy on Spatial Justice. The first critique regards differentiated access to goods insensitive to individual capital. The second concerns the trade-off against individual liberty implied in a new geographical contract anchored in the societal value of cities. I argue that those spatial justice propositions disregard the full set of contents within multidimensional values of justice. That argument is constructed in three parts. First, I summarise the theoretical support of Amartya Sen's approach to justice, in particular the ideas of openness and plurality. It follows an overview of how Jacques Lévy anchors his propositions in the empirical analysis of cities and in a new epoch of justice. Finally, I construct my disagreement with the prioritisation of some components of values of justice over others, implied in the legitimation of a specific spatial agenda. I conclude this reflection by pointing towards a more encompassing yet substantive theory of spatial justice. The postscript summarises how continued exchanges with the criticised author deconstructed the argument on excessive prescription or normativity of Jacques Lévy propositions. It clarifies a misinterpretation that emerged from the coincidence between two facets of the same actor as researcher and as citizens. As part of that clarification, I underline the importance of the couple systemic goods/ public goods. It also acknowledges recent developments of my thought on the two advanced critiques and notes the lack of realism of my original argument. It concludes with the theoretical cornerstone of spatial justice laid down during this process.
Spatial Justice: Law and the Geography of Withdrawal
While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space. More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. And, second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by poststructural, feminist, postecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze-Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.
Justice spatiale / Spatial Justice, 2018
Interview conducted on the 10th of July 2017 in Paris, between Anne Clerval and Fabrice Ripoll, from the JEDI Group, and online journal Justice Spatiale / Spatial Justice (Sophie Moreau and Pascale Philifert). For the ten-year (or so) anniversary edition of Justice Spatiale-Spatial Justice, and ten years after the founding conference entitled “Spatial Justice and Injustice” in 2008, we would like to open contradictory debates and discuss the concept of spatial justice.
Andreas PM - The Inconclusive Spatial Justice
Sophie Watson (ed.), Spatial Justice in the City, London: Routledge, 2019, 2019
Spatial justice as a concept seems to be at home in many disciplines, such as geography, sociology, law, politics, philosophy and so on. Precisely because of this, its nature, definition, context and repercussions are yet to be worked out to a satisfactory degree. The contributions in this volume help advance the discussion, adding context and expanding the modes of defining and experiencing spatial justice. It is remarkable, for example, that spatial justice can inform contexts as varied as the gulf states, british self-defence manuals for women, water religious rituals, post-war housing reclamations, Instagram tags, waste transport and art practices – and likewise be informed by these new contexts. It attests to the richness but also potential vagueness of the concept.
Law’s Spatial Turn: Geography, Justice and a Certain Fear of Space
This is a critical reading of the current literature on law and geography. The article argues that the literature is characterized by an undertheorization of the concept of space. Instead, the focus is either on the specific geography of law in the form of jurisdiction, or as a simple terminological innovation. Instead, the article suggests that law’s spatial turn ought to consider space as a singular parameter to the hitherto legal preoccupation with time, history and waiting. This forces law into dealing with a new, peculiarly spatial kind of uncertainty in terms of simultaneity, disorientation, materiality and exclusionary corporeal emplacement. The main area in which this undertheorization forcefully manifests itself is that of spatial justice. Despite its critical potential, the concept has been reduced by the majority of the relevant literature into another version of social, distributive or regional justice. On the contrary, if the peculiar characteristics of space are to be taken into account, a concept of justice will have to be rethought on a much more fundamental level than that.
Spatial Justice in the Lawscape
in Andrea Brighenti (ed.), Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and POlitics of the In-Between, Ashgate, 2013, 2013
The connection between law and the city is an increasingly relevant area of transdisciplinary research currently explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. Existing approaches, however, have not adequately focussed on the fusion between the law and the space of a city, the geographical physicality of the urban in its material ontology on the one hand, and the operations of the law within such materiality on the other. This chapter builds on my previous work on the concept of the Lawscape, which has shown that law’s reluctance of the law to grapple with urban space may well be on account of the counter-intuitiveness of the connection: positive law greatly relies on its immateriality, its objective, abstract application independently of spatial parameters. I argue here that the lawscape is the surface on which the concept of spatial justice emerges as a true interstice. The problem with spatial justice, however, is that it is woefully undertheorised and usually equated with rather innocuous constructions such as social justice and democracy. Employing a Deleuzian approach, I offer a conceptualisation of spatial justice not as synthesis but as emergence from the folds of the lawscape.