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Justice and the spatial imagination
Mustafa Dikec
To cite this version:
Mustafa Dikec. Justice and the spatial imagination. Environment and Planning, 2001,
�10.1068/a3467�. �hal-01258169�
Introduction
In an article published almost two decades ago, G H Pirie (1983, page 472) wrote:
``It would be a pity indeed if the busyness of political philosophers was to go
completely unnoticed by spatial the orists and applied researchers. Equally, it would
be a pity ... if this essay were to stand alone as a review of implic ations of that
busyness.''
In that article, entitled ``On spatial justice'', Pirie reflected ``on the desirability and
possibility of fashioning a concept of spatial justice from notions of social justice and
territorial social justice'' ( page 465). The present paper offers yet another reflection on
the notion of justice as it relates to space and spatiality, to point to the ways in which
various forms of i njustice are manifest in the very process of spatialization, and the
ways in which an increased awareness of the dialectical relationship between (in)justice
and spatiality could make spac e a site of politics in fig hting against injustice. As will
become clear further through the text, the conceptualizations of both justice and space
differ from the ways Pirie once viewed them.
The paper is organized in five se ctions. The first section is a brief review of the
geography literature which engages with the notion of justice, and serves to outline
the theoretical position assumed in this pap er. The second sectio n p rovides an urban
context in which a notion of spatial justice may be conceptualized. The third section is
devoted to such a conceptualization. The fourth sec tion presents the c ase of French
urban policy in order to make the argu ments more concrete. The co ncluding section is
an attempt to define an ethico-political ground on which emancipatory politics in an
urban spatial framework may be defended. The pap e r i s conceptual in nature. Examples,
however, are provided to stir the imagination as to the ways in which the dialectical
relationship between (in)justice and spatiality may be conceived. The example s, there-
fore, are used to make this relationship more concrete, rather than attempting to
provide a tho rough discussion of the cases selected.
Justice and the spatial imagination
Mustafa Dikec°
Department of Urban Planning, University of California Los Angeles, 3250 Public Policy
Building, Los A ngeles, CA 90095-1656, USA; e-ma i l: mdikec@yahoo.com
Received 13 March 2001; in revised form 9 July 2001
Environment a nd Planning A 2001, volume 33, pages 1785 ^ 1805
Abstract. I atte mpt in this paper to conceptualize a notion of spatial justice in order to point to the
dialectical relationship between (in)justice and spatial ity, and to the role that spatialization plays in
the production and reproduction of domination and repression. I argue th at the city provides a
productive ground for the formation of a spatially informed ethics of political solidarity against
domination and repression. A `triad' is articulated to inform such p olitics, which brings together three
notions: the spatial dialectics of injustice, the right to the city, and the right to differenc e. The notion
of spatial justice is employed as a theoretical underpinning to avoid abusive inte rpretations of
Lefebvrian rights in a l iberal framework of individual rights. The case of French ur ban policy is
used for illustrative purposes. Fina lly, th e notion of e
¨
galiberte
¨
is introduced as a moral ground on
which the triad may be defended.
DOI:10.1068/a3467
Geographical encounters
(1)
`` The explicit engagement of geography with m orality and social justice'', David Sm ith
(1994, page 4) argues, ``dates from the latter part of the 1960s''. There is, of course, good
reason to believe this. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s b rought to attention
issues, such as identity politics, r ights to the city, rights to difference, and social justice,
to name a few, and have been influential in almost every discipline. Geography was no
exception.
The first explicit attempt to link justice to geog raphical terms was made by
Bleddyn Davies, who first coined the ter m `territorial justice' in h is 1968 book entitled
Social Needs and Resources in Local Services. Davies's conceptualization was norma-
tive in nature, designed to assess the distribution of loc al servic es with resp ect to the
needs of designated service areas. Approaches of this kind came under close scrutiny
with the emergence of the so-called radical geography of the early 1970s. Regional
science method s were criticized as being dehumanizing and d istracting attention from
social problems, and attention, accordingly, ``moved on to the processes responsible for
spatial disparities in people's life chances: for what was beginning to be recognized as
spatial injustice'' (Smith, 1994, page 5).
The book that broke new ground came out in 1973. David Harvey, in his Social
Justice and the City, sought to push John Rawls's (1971) liberal formulations to its
limits, with a territorial twist, and arrived at a notion of `territorial social jus tice',
which he defined as ``a just distribution justly arr ived at''. Harvey, however, was m ore
interested in the structural dynamics of the capitalist society, and therefore, not merely
in distribution but, above all, in issues of production. Rawls's scheme, which did not
have production at its core and which, indeed, left it to the workings of the market,
would not take him there.
Davies's initial con ceptualization and Harvey's earlier work have been influential in
stimulating research on the spatiality of social justice, and the notion of territorial
justic e still guides research (see, for example, Boyne and Powell, 1991). A shift in focus
oc curred with the publication of Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Differ-
ence (1990). Harvey (1992) engaged again with the notion of justice, this time building
not on Rawls, but on Young, with an emphasis on forms of oppression as sourc es of
injustice. This was followed, with a diminished interest in Young's formulation, by a
modification of his earlier formulation a s ``just production of jus t geographical differ-
enc e''. His ce ntral concerns now were uneven geographical d evelopment as an intrinsic
feature of the capitalist mode of production, and the social construction of principles
of justice (Harvey, 1996). Although Young's work was initially embraced, it was later
criticized for its `difference'-guided identity politics by scholars seeking strategic forms
of essentialism, such as human sameness, as sources of ethico-political soli darity
(Smith, 1997; 2000).
To recapitulate: geography's engagement with social justice started with an exclu-
sive concern on distribution in a Cartesian spa ce (Davies, 1968); continued with an
emphasis on production, the workings of the capitalist city, and uneven geograph ies of
capitalism (Harvey, 1973; 1996); shifted focus with a celebration of identity and differ-
ence, and an emphasis not on justice and consensus, but on injustice and dissensus
(Gleeson, 1998; Harvey, 1992; Merrifield, 1997; Merrifield and Swyngedouw, 1997);
and ended up, for the moment, with a problematization of the preoccupation with
difference, and a search for universal bonds of solidar ity (Smith, 19 97; 2000).
There have been few s tudies, however, that have explicitly employed a notion of
`spatial justice'. One of these was Steven F lusty's (1994) study of the buil t environment
(1)
This section is a condensed version of Dikec° (2001). A recently published review may also be
found in Smith (2000).
1786 M Dikec°
in Los Angeles, where he argued for an equitable distribution of spatial res ources for
all to ensure spatial justice given that space is claimed by dominant groups in the
society. T his, of course, is a most welcome and challenging statement but Flusty, rather
than elaborating the notion, focus ed merely on form to the neglect of the structural
dynamics of the particular kind of spatialization that he wanted to analyze. The most
recent engagement with the spatial dimension of justice, by explicitly employing the
term spatial justice, has been that of E dward Soja (2000) in his Postmetropolis,as
part of his ongoing project for the assertio n of the spatiality of hum an life and the
formation of spatially conscious politics initiated in his earlier work (1989).
The article that opens this pap e r was an explicit attempt to conc eptualize a notion
of spatial justice. Pirie's spatial sensibilities were certainly intriguing. However, his
conc eptualization deserved a rese r vation. He, admittedly, treated spac e ``in the [then]-
familiar way as some kind of container, as an entity or physical expression made up of
individual locations and their distance relations'' (1983, page 471). It is a pity that Pirie
stopped at what seems to be a perfect starting point (1983, pages 471, 472; emphasis
added):
``This notion of space is not inviolate. It may also be conceived of as a social
creation
ö
as a structure created by society and not merely as a context for soci ety
... . Conceptualizing spatial justice in terms of a view of space as process, and
perhaps in terms of radical notions of justice, stands as an exacting challenge and,
not unlikely, a s the single occasion there might be for requiring and constructuring
a concept of spatial justice. ... In spite of the challenge of spatial fetishis m, and in
spite of the radical assault on liberal distributive concerns, it would be worthwhile
investigating the possibility of matching justice to notions of socially constructed
space.''
What follows, then, is an endeavour that undertakes this enticing suggestion. Befo re
moving on to the next section, I return briefly to Rawls, and chart some of the
criticisms levelled against h i s work for they provide the agenda around which the
present paper is structured. A recurring critique directed against Rawls was h i s con-
viction of a si ngle co nception of justice that can rationally be defined, presupposing a
rather hom oge neous public with no serious conflicts. Later, in h is Political Liberalism,
Rawls (1993) modified hi s previous `well-ordered' view of society, recog nized conflicts
with a postulate of consensus, and admitted that his co nception of society as relatively
homogeneous in his e arlier work was no longer a plausible a ssumption. His postulate
of consensus, however, was not w ithout problems. He was still inclined ``to keep
incom mensurability outside the public realm and admit to it only when rea sonable
and capable of contributing to his overlapping consensus'' (Katz nelson, 1997, page 52).
The recognition of thi s problem guided The Urbanization of Injustice (Merrifield and
Swyngedouw, 1997) which was a coll ection of essays attempting to reconsider the
lessons learned from Harvey's Social Justice and the City (1973), in the light of debates
around `difference' and `nontotalizing' discourses. The focus, therefore, was not on
consensus, but on dissensus and injustice. The conceptual tool for such an approach
was provided by Young, according to whom injustice ``should be defi ned primarily
in terms of the concepts of oppression and domination, rather th an distribution''
(1990, page 192). Although ``Young's alternative vision for justice remains in choate,
she c ertainly provides a powerful theory of injustice''' (G leeson, 1998, page 89), and
the framework she provides seems to be a productive terrain on which to constru e a
notion of spatial justice, for spatialization (the mode of social production of space) is one
of the major systematic producers of domination and oppression: that is, of injustice.
Some of the basic tenets of this project may now be discerned. The argum ent is
built around the social production of space, with the idea that the very production
Justic e and the spatial imagination 1787
of space, which is inherently a conflictual process, not only manifests various forms of
injustice, but actually produces and reproduces them (thereby maintaining established
social relations of domination and oppression). Such an approach clearly departs from
an exclusively distributional approach. This, however, does not negate the importance
of di stributional issues, sinc e, for example,
``when people are utterly excluded from active political participation in city affairs,
distributional issu es, of the sorts Rawls pinpoints, are often all that is left for
communities and groups to organize around and to seek substantive representation''
(Merrifield, 1997, page 202).
What should be criticized in the distributive paradigm, therefore, is the tendency to
reduce social justice to distribution. I try to reconcile this tension through a notion of
spatial dialectics of injustice, in an attempt neither to overvalorize nor to devalorize
distributional matters. The attempt here, it should be noted, is not one aim ed at
refini ng Rawls's arguments. It is rather to evoke the spatial dimensi on of justice
ö
via
a notion of spatial justice
ö
informed by the charges leveled against Rawls, whose
engagement (and liberal political philosophers' in g eneral) with social justice mostly
remained as an abstract ideal, ``invariably devoid of time and place'' (Merrifield and
Swyngedouw, 1997, page 3), and ``without the city'' (Katznelson, 1997, page 49).
Rawls was obviously weak on the sociospatial front. This might also explain hi s
tendency to ``conce ive of individuals as social atoms prior to social relations and
institutions'' (Young, 1990, page 27), another s ource of critique directed against his
work, mos tly by communitarian scholars (see, for example, Sandel, 1982). Rawls's
major conc ern was the maximization of individual liberty, which would enable indi-
viduals to pursue their particular goals in their particular ways without interference.
Rights, in his scheme, were used to this end, to foster self-interest, provided that the
rights of others are respec ted. Rawls's moral self, wh i ch was prior to social relation-
ships, lacked community as constitutive of his or her identity (this situation leads to an
`unencumbered self', as Sandel would call it); did not ne c essarily en courage civic
action, and actually contributed to its deterioration (Mouffe, 1992; Sk inner, 1992),
and his or her `identity' and `differences' went largely unnotic ed under a conc eption
of a relatively homogeneous public (Young, 1990).
The way i n which I try to address this problem diverges my position from that of
Young's. Although I draw on her definition of injustice, I do not do so in the name of
`difference'. Rather, I turn to E
è
tienne Balibar's notion of e
¨
galiberte
¨
(equality ^ freedom)
as the ethico-political bond that would inform emancipatory movements, n ot in the
name of a certain particularity, but, rather, in the name of an enactment of equality
and freedom. E
è
galiberte
¨
provides the `universal' bond of solidarity, and more on the
notion may be found i n the concluding section.
Underlying these premises, and indeed the whole endeavour, is the conviction that
approaches to, and principles of, jus tice are ti me and space sp ecific. A close relation-
ship, therefore, between sociospatial sp ecificities and conceptions of justice is assumed.
I should like to believe th at a sensitivity to the spatial dimension of justice may be
developed
ö
especially in societies where the injustices of spatial dynamics are exposed
and largely recognized
ö
to guide eman cipatory movements to suppre ss domination and
oppression in and through space. The city seems to p rovide a fertile ground for such a
prospect.
Urban sensibilities
The impulses of the 1960s and 1970s were also influential in bringing the `urban
question' to the political agenda. Two m ajor rea sons for the development of an urban
sensibility in this period may be noted. First, the re was a growing reactio n to the
1788 M Dikec°