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Part I
Space
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1 Spatial in/justice and place
In an attempt to provide a background of spatial justice that complements approaches in the environmental humanities for the following chapters of the book, this opening chapter of Part I, āSpaceā, outlines a brief critical history of spatial and place justice in geography and social theory. Chapter 2 further demonstrates how a spatial theories of justice might fruitfully apply to scholarship and writing in the environmental humanities. Included throughout, I highlight some key figures, such as Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, Iris Marion Young, Tim Cresswell, Yi Fu Tuan, and Edward Relph, who all have contributed to constructing the paradigms of spatial justice and place studies. Their writings do more than outline spatial theory; they provide a foundation for this bookās environmental focus. This first chapter, the first half of Part I, primarily serves as a critical introduction for Ecological Exile. It also reinforces the overall argument and provides some literary and visual examples throughout. The main objective here is to establish how spatial and environmental justice anticipate solastalgia as it relates to place (see Chapter 2), providing the groundwork for the remaining chapters of the book.
Spatial theories of justice
One universal principle underlying spatial theories of justice is that wherever there are geographies, there are social injustices. By this logical perspective, spatial justice is a collective and universal issue whether it is acknowledged or not. Edward Soja, the urban planner, postmodern geographer, and promoter of spatial justice as a way of addressing many social issues, explains, āSpace is not an empty void. It is always filled with politics, ideology, and other forces shaping our lives and challenging us to engage in struggles over geographyā (2010, 19). Concepts of space and justice responding to unjust geographies have existed in various documentable forms dating back to at least the social philosophies of ancient Athens. Spatial justice has, however, only been significantly theorised and developed over the last 50 years in the wake of civil, financial, and environmental distresses. In these contemporary contexts, spatial justice illuminates how access to social goods and services depend upon where one lives or works (Smith 1994). Peopleās ethnicity, class, or gender, in combination with where they find themselves in space, may affect how they are treated or their right to participate equally in society. Another purpose of spatial justice is to identify who manages public and private space and in what ways those controllers promote oppression or equality. To this end, there are numerous examples of how spatial justice functions in many global contexts.
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Rather than functioning as an amorphous fixed background (i.e. abstract or inert), the notion of space in critical spatial theory covers a range of interconnected issues for humans and nonhumans alike, which, for the purposes of this book, often overlap with environmental justice (Soja 2010, 4). Space not only constitutes physical or material form; it is also socially produced and constructed as an idea or concept, affecting urban economies, environmental policies, and human rights, as well as forms of creative output in the arts and humanities. For example, mismanagement of urban space ā such as placing industrial waste sites near economically depressed neighbourhoods, gentrifying urban zones, or redrawing voting districts for political gain ā actively generates instances of inequality and exploitation through a variety of forms of oppression and discrimination.
Referring to both just and unjust circumstances of space (hence the reversible and reflexive term āin/justiceā), spatial justice was developed and theorised as a specific approach in Sojaās book Seeking Spatial Justice (2010). In it, as explained more throughout this section, Soja aimed to expand the parameters of social justice as spatial phenomena by emphasising that space and geography remain an important element to any discipline engaging with social and cultural formations (2010, 4). While Sojaās book serves as the most extensive study on the subject to date, he is only one of many theorists before him who have explored the underling motivation for developing the term spatial justice ā that is, how social struggles over territories and geographies link to injustices.
Since the 1960s, geographers and social philosophers have confronted territorial struggles by arguing that spatial dynamics, not only historical or social ones, should be central in debates about improving society.1 Critical perspectives that challenge oppressive and undemocratic spatial practices largely date back to the work of French urbanist Henri Lefebvre and philosopher Michel Foucault, among others, when in the 1960s and 1970s they wrote and lectured about the fundamental relationship between space and power in society (Lefebvre 1968, 1991; Foucault 1980, 1982, 1986). The Marxist geographer David Harvey built on this work in the 1970s and fundamentally cemented spatial studies into critical discourse by applying social and moral philosophy to issues related to geography and environments.
In Social Justice and the City (2009 [1973]), his book on the relationship between urban space and social processes that still resonates today, Harvey deduces that principles of social justice had significant relevance for the application of spatial and geographical approaches to urbanisation (2009, 9). He argues the ādistinction between social processes and spatial form is always regarded as artificial rather than realā. But, he then suggests, āSpatial forms are there seen not as inanimate objects within which the social process unfolds, but as things which ācontainā social processes in the same manner that social processes are spatialā (Harvey 2009, 11; original emphasis). Harvey, at the time, called this dynamic the āsocial-process-spatial-form themeā, insisting upon the need to understand the ways in which human activity in society creates a need for distinct spatial concepts and understanding (2009, 14).
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Harvey drew from and expanded upon the idea of āterritorial justiceā originally coined by the Welsh social planner Bleddyn Davis in his book Social Needs and Resources in Local Services (1968), which reasoned the allocation of public services to territories must meet specific social needs. For Harvey, territorial justice extends beyond equal distribution of resources, although he acknowledges that it forms the basis of distributive justice. Harvey concluded that understanding processes of justice are not enough (in reflection of Rawlsā Theory of Justice); instead, he argued that territorial injustices, what he calls āterritorial social justicesā, emerge from unjustly produced power in social spaces, specifically through urban development and income distribution (2009, 99ā101). Territorial justice serves as a fundamental principle of spatial justice, but perhaps it falls short in the ways it offers one component of a larger theory categorising various conditions of injustices that root from spatial perspectives. Territorial social justice relates exclusively to forms of distribution in relation to social constructions of power, whereas spatial justice provides a wider range of applications to issues such as unjust racial, gender, or environmental conditions caused by space, which all might include but are not limited to territorial justice.
Other geographers such as Doreen Massey (1994) and Derek Gregory (1994), in addition to Soja (1989) and Harvey (1990, 1996a, 2009), later pointed out how social processes are also spatial in forms of environmental, postcolonial, gender, or class injustices. This productive dialogue between geography and social theory is commonly known as the āspatial turnā, or a way of reimagining social and historical perspectives through a spatial lens. These spatial perspectives were additionally rooted in the ācultural turnā that took place within the discipline of geography beginning in the 1970s and expanding in the 1980s and 1990s. Both āturnsā (spatial and cultural) are broadly drawn from British social geographers interested in issues of space and power relations and American geographers concerned with symbolic productions of space (Scott 2004, 24). A primary objective of critical geography is to examine the relationships between humans and environments, and how these interactions shape the debates across various disciplinary boundaries (Duncan et al. 2004, 3). Geography, as Derek Gregory outlines in Geographical Imaginations (1994), āis not confined to any one discipline, or ever to the specialised vocabularies of the academy; it travels instead through social practices at large and is implicated in myriad topographies of power and knowledgeā (11). The spatial turn primarily resulted from cultural and human approaches to geography, modes that have migrated to many other forms of cultural and literary criticism in the humanities, and which drew from aspects of cultural theory, such as poststructuralism, feminism, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory (Scott 2004, 24).
The early fusion of cultural and spatial theories in the context of justice appears in the work of Foucault. He presented another way of critiquing issues of knowledge and power in culture and society, but he did so through a uniquely historically and philosophically informed viewpoint of space (Soja 1989, 31). Soja maintains:
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Archaeology is a suggestive term here because it implies a balanced proportion of the historical, social, and spatial measured out through stratigraphic layers of existence. In this way, time and space are mutually interdependent, even though notions of space have received much less critical attention and practical application.
Foucault famously stated in a lecture entitled āOf Other Spaces / Des espaces autresā, which was given to a group of architects on 14 March 1967 and posthumously published, that discourses of the nineteenth century were dominated by time, history, and evolution, whereas thinkers in the twentieth century finally began to examine ideas about space as they related to the modern and postmodern condition (1986, 22). He later admitted, āGeography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concernsā (Foucault 2007, 182). Foucaultās statements about space challenged the disciplinary tendency to privilege historical time; he instead invited us to think more critically about how space substantially informs both historical circumstances and social practices.
For these reasons, contemporary approaches to spatial justice take as a starting point the late 1960s, when perspectives combining the interplay among space, geography, and social justice were being developed and theorised in the wake of political unrest in the student and labour strikes of Paris in May 1968. These mass protests both acknowledged and confronted spatial injustices, particularly resisting urban renewal projects that would displace working class populations out to the margins of Paris in fear they might maintain an electoral majority (Soja 2010, 100). Paris is not my focus, however. It is more of a critical point of departure or the spatial zeitgeist for what is ahead in the overall historical logic of this book, which recognises the shift whereby formulations of spatial justice began to take root.
Critical responses to unjust spaces that began in the 1960s were largely due to a century and a half of privileging social historicism as the only way to examine territorial struggles. The aim was to challenge the idea that space is no longer considered a flat or one-dimensional way of documenting geography, as in traditional forms of cartography often influenced by oppressive empires and feudal societies, or as an absolute thing in itself. The issue of space has become ontological and epistemological ā intimately connected to the ways we know and exist in the world, often addressing questions about the experience of being in and understanding space.
The more difficult question to answer might be what exactly is space? The problem with this question is that space is relational as well as material, what Harvey theorised as a relationship between and within objects (2009, 12). And so, we must then ask how do different human and cultural practices use and conceptualise space? In a 2014 interview with the geographer John Morrissey, over 40 years after Social Justice and the City was published, Harvey offers another important and yet similar question for consideration: āwhat is the social process which is actually producing these geographical patterns in which you see the embeddedness of injustice in the landscape?ā (Morrissey 2014, 213). This question implies a social-cultural nexus that might also be explored through the ways creative/artistic production respond to spatial injustices.
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A social approach to spatial justice is profitably expanded in the cultural realm of the arts and humanities, where creative responses in literature and filmmaking, to cite only two examples, might clarify how real and imagined forms of injustices related to space are represented in narrative, setting, dialogue, or embedded in the social context of a text. Indeed, spatial theorists often cite literature, film, or paintings to illustrate otherwise abstract concepts. Print and visual texts aim to communicate through various constructions of spatial forms. In particular, the written word contains properties āfrom the flux of experience and fixes them in spatial formā. As Harvey goes on to explain, any system of representation, of which I would argue defines the essence of creative practice in the arts and humanities, functions as a spatial process because it isolates the flow of experience, thereby distorting what it is attempting to represent (1990, 206).
Digging a bit deeper, critical spatial thinking draws upon three main principles. First is the concept of āontologies of beingā, which underscores that we are all spatial beings as much as we are social and historical in the ways we know and exist in the world. Second is the āsocial production of spaceā, or the idea that space can be socially changed because it is socially constructed and produced based upon a concept or idea, affecting economies, politics, and cultural/creative production. Third is what Soja has labelled the āsocio-spatial dialecticā, which demonstrates how the social and spatial are mutually dependent and shape each other in various ways (1989; 2009, 2). These concepts were all originally theorised by Lefebvre in La Production de lāespace (1974), later translated as The Production of Space (1991), and, along with Harveyās notion of territorial justice, they are building blocks for spatial theories of justice later developed by Soja in Seeking Spatial Justice (2010).
Spatial justice arises out of a new spatial consciousness, what Harvey once called the āsocial-process-spatial-formā and what Soja has termed the āsocio-spatial dialecticā. It is the āidea that there exists a mutually influential and formative relation between the social and the spatial dimensions of human life, each shaping the other in similar waysā (S...
