In the context of increasing division and segregation in cities across the world, along with pressing concerns around austerity, environmental degradation, homelessness, violence, and refugees, this book pursues a multidisciplinary approach to spatial justice in the city. Spatial justice has been central to urban theorists in various ways. Intimately connected to social justice, it is a term implicated in relations of power which concern the spatial distribution of resources, rights and materials. Arguably there can be no notion of social justice that is not spatial. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos has argued that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. As such, urban planning and policy interventions are always, to some extent at least, about spatial justice. And, as cities become ever more unequal, it is crucial that urbanists address questions of spatial justice in the city. To this end, this book considers these questions from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Crossing law, sociology, history, cultural studies, and geography, the book’s overarching concern with how to think spatial justice in the city brings a fresh perspective to issues that have concerned urbanists for several decades. The inclusion of empirical work in London brings the political, social, and cultural aspects of spatial justice to life. The book will be of interest to academics and students in the field of urban studies, sociology, geography, planning, space law, and cultural studies.

In 1996, the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, a grassroots advocacy organization, won a historic legal victory against the city’s Metropolitan Transit Authority. The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

Throughout his distinguished and influential career, David Harvey has defined and redefined the relationship between politics, capitalism, and the social aspects of geographical theory. Laying out Harvey's position that geography could not remain objective in the face of urban poverty and associated ills, Social Justice and the City is perhaps the most widely cited work in the field. Harvey analyzes core issues in city planning and policy--employment and housing location, zoning, transport costs, concentrations of poverty--asking in each case about the relationship between social justice and space. How, for example, do built-in assumptions about planning reinforce existing distributions of income? Rather than leading him to liberal, technocratic solutions, Harvey's line of inquiry pushes him in the direction of a "revolutionary geography," one that transcends the structural limitations of existing approaches to space. Harvey's emphasis on rigorous thought and theoretical innovation gives the volume an enduring appeal. This is a book that raises big questions, and for that reason geographers and other social scientists regularly return to it.

Spatializing Justice calls for architects and urban designers to do more than design buildings and physical systems. Architects should take a position against inequality and practice accordingly. With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture— Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions. These building blocks call for expanded modes of practice, through which architects can imagine new spatial procedures, political and economic strategies, and modalities of sociability. Challenging existing exclusionary policies can advance a more experimental architecture, one not bound by formal parameters. Architects must think of themselves as designers not only of things but of civic processes, complicate the ideas of ownership and property, and imagine new sites of research, pedagogy, and intervention. As one of the texts advises, "the questions must be different questions if we want different answers." Cruz and Forman are principals in ESTUDIO TEDDY CRUZ + FONNA FORMAN, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. The work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world.

For much of the twentieth century improvement in the situation of disadvantaged communities was a focus for urban planning and policy. Yet over the past three decades the ideological triumph of neoliberalism has caused the allocation of spatial, political, economic, and financial resources to favor economic growth at the expense of wider social benefits. Susan Fainstein's concept of the "just city" encourages planners and policymakers to embrace a different approach to urban development. Her objective is to combine progressive city planners' earlier focus on equity and material well-being with considerations of diversity and participation so as to foster a better quality of urban life within the context of a global capitalist political economy. Fainstein applies theoretical concepts about justice developed by contemporary philosophers to the concrete problems faced by urban planners and policymakers and argues that, despite structural obstacles, meaningful reform can be achieved at the local level. In the first half of The Just City, Fainstein draws on the work of John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and others to develop an approach to justice relevant to twenty-first-century cities, one that incorporates three central concepts: diversity, democracy, and equity. In the book's second half, Fainstein tests her ideas through case studies of New York, London, and Amsterdam by evaluating their postwar programs for housing and development in relation to the three norms. She concludes by identifying a set of specific criteria for urban planners and policymakers to consider when developing programs to assure greater justice in both the process of their formulation and their effects.

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space. Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension. Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.

The book presents an in-depth and theoretically-grounded analysis of urban gardening practices (re)emerging worldwide as new forms of bottom-up socio-political participation. By complementing the scholarly perspectives through posing real cases, it focuses on how these practices are able to address – together with environmental and planning questions – the most fundamental issues of spatial justice, social cohesion, inclusiveness, social innovations and equity in cities. Through a critical exploration of international case studies, this collection investigates whether, and how, gardeners are willing and able to contrast urban spatial arrangements that produce peculiar forms of social organisation and structures for inclusion and exclusion, by considering pervasive inequalities in the access to space, natural resources and services, as well as considerable disparities in living conditions.