Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- One Understanding justice and fairness in and of the city
- Section One Local environmental justice
- Section Two Spatial justice and the right to the city
- Section Three Participation, procedural fairness and local decision making
- Section Four Social justice and life course
- Index
Section Two - Spatial justice and the right to the city
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- One Understanding justice and fairness in and of the city
- Section One Local environmental justice
- Section Two Spatial justice and the right to the city
- Section Three Participation, procedural fairness and local decision making
- Section Four Social justice and life course
- Index
Summary
It would be a pity indeed if the busyness of political philosophers was to go completely unnoticed by spatial theorists and applied researchers. Equally, it would be a pity […] if this essay were to stand alone as a review of implications of that busyness. (Pirie, 1983: 472)
These are the opening words of an article by G.H. Pirie, which seemingly for the first time used the term spatial justice. However, he knew that his interpretation of space was similar to the then ‘familiar way as some kind of container, as an entity or physical expression made up of individual locations and their distance relations’ (Pirie, 1983: 471). As we have shown in Chapter 1, this conceptualisation of justice and spatiality fails to recognise that injustices not only happen in space, but are also created, maintained and exacerbated by it. It is this recognition that is at heart of the three chapters that make up this section of the book. All three pay homage to Lefebvre's concept of ‘the right to the city’ and consider the city as a key site of politics. They argue that the right to the city is about having access to all aspects of urban life as well as the making of the city. It is about the city being shaped not for us but by us. The authors draw on their knowledge and experience of Newcastle (and Delhi in Chapter 6) to provide examples of the various ways in which the dialectical relationship between (in) justices and spatiality are played out in the everyday life of citizens and their experience in and of the city.
The section starts with Chapter 6 in which Suzanne Speak and Ashok Kumar show why we need to consider all cities as ordinary and distinct cities even if they are labelled differently as global cities or world cities. They show how seemingly very different cities, Newcastle and Delhi, share similar struggles for space, between economy and society, nature and development, the affluent and the poor. They argue that despite their perceived position on the urban hierarchy or typology, both cities are the sites of some common political contestations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Justice and Fairness in the CityA Multi-Disciplinary Approach to 'Ordinary' Cities, pp. 103 - 106Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2016