Spatial Justice in the City

Sophie Watson, Sophie Watson

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351185776
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Derecho
• Categoría: Teoría y práctica del derecho

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.

Chapter 1

Introducing spatial justice

Sophie Watson

What do we mean by spatial justice? Certainly it is a laudable concept and objective for a city, but what exactly is it and what strategies might be pursued to get there? At a straightforward level, the term connects notions of social justice with notions of space. Easy concepts though, these are not. Let us look back briefly at earlier debates. The concept of spatial justice came to prominence particularly in the work of Henri Lefebvre, and two geographers – Ed Soja and David Harvey – who in different ways saw the achievement of social justice as being realized and visible in space. In other words, social justice cannot abstractly be reached, since social relations take place in a particular space. Thus, the two terms for Soja cannot be disentangled since spatial relations are constitutive of, and constituted by, relations of social justice. At a pragmatic level, this has implications for planning, urban design, and other interventions aimed at tackling social inequality in the city.

Contemporary discussions of spatial justice have been dominated by debates on urban justice from strongly Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives (Harvey 1973; Soja 2010) to more liberal-based frames. David Harvey’s original statement in Social Justice and the City was a critique of “liberal formulations,” especially those of John Rawls (1972), to be replaced by radical formulations based on an understanding of the urban process in capitalism from a Marxist perspective. Inequality and injustice were seen to be inherent in the social relations of the capitalist mode of production. Harvey called for a production-side account of justice rather than relying on the distributional forms of justice, for which Rawls was known. The influence of Marxist urban geography has meant that questions of spatial justice are assumed to arise from the structural inequalities of capital–labour relations (from a global to a local neighbourhood scale). Harvey’s project of tracing historical geographical materialism identified uneven spatial outcomes from the patterns of capital investment (and disinvestment) in the search for profit.

Alongside this, the spatial element of spatial justice has also been conceptualised mostly via Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad of spatial practice, representations of space, and representational space (Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]). The gulf between the lived space of everyday practices, the conceived space of planners, and imagined or artistic space shows the degree of injustices. This is turned back towards the city in Lefebvre’s idea of the “right to the city” (Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), in which the conceived space of planners and scientists maps onto the imaginative space of urban dwellers to enable everyone a right to the city in the production of urban space. It is the right to have the city made in the image of the majority of urban dwellers rather than in the image of capital (Harvey 1973). The right to the city idea defines a call to social mobilisation (Merrifield 2006) which has inspired social movements in a range of cities of the global North and South. In an important recent intervention, Barnett (2017, see Bridge in this volume) argues that in both these approaches, the more structural analysis and the approach that emphasises claims-based social mobilisations (and indeed in the liberal rationalist approaches, such as Rawls’s, that they oppose), there tends to be the same third-person form of reasoning of an ideal of justice. Instead, Barnett urges that we turn towards practical reason through forms of intersubjective inquiry. Here, justice is an on-going pluralist struggle that is never fully resolved.

For decades, the debate around the co-constitution of space and society has rumbled through the literature, with different weights attached to the two notions. In 2009, Peter Marcuse (2009), a theorist who in particular has addressed the concept of the “just city,” debated with Soja (2009) the relative significance of the two terms. For Marcuse, the emphasis was on social injustice and the different ways this is played out spatially, while Soja afforded a primacy to spatial relations determining social inequalities. The implications of these arguments for the urban dynamics of social inequalities are clear. In Marcuse’s discussion, the focus is on unequal access to urban resources, education, and civil rights, which then lead to patterns of urban segregation, which also have effects – multiplying perhaps the very inequalities that produce them. The main objectives of planning policies are thus to address and reduce such inequalities, through the redistribution of resources, on the one hand, or through paying attention to questions of representation and decision-making processes, on the other. These two approaches have also been a matter of debate amongst urban theorists (see Herbert, Chapter 2).

As the chapters in this book testify, there is no easy way of defining the complexity of the term, which slides easily across different disciplinary boundaries and registers. A more recent turn to the post-human brings further complexity to the concept, where it appears as an assemblage of human/non-human relations and networks, emerging across different spatial contexts and temporalities, often shifting and not fixed, eluding easy definition. Spatial justice resides also in the space of differences, themselves not static emerging in the spaces of the city, as well as constitutive of them. It erupts and emerges in a complex mix of matter and bodies, both human and non-human. Spatial justice, the erosion of social inequalities or differences constituted in relations of power, across city spaces, can only ever be resolved temporarily, producing in time new patterns and distributions that need to be addressed. This fluidity makes the vibrant energy of the city, which fascinates, enables, disables, and makes possible new formations and relations which themselves are constantly settled and are unsettled. What is important also are the politics of practice. Spatial justice is an objective, which, though elusive, is always worth striving for, even if the gains are temporary and shifting, and in need of defending once they have settled in place.

A productive and exciting different route into thinking about spatial justice has been inspired by the work on legal theorists, notably Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, who has written the final chapter for this collection. In his book, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2015) suggests: “To put it simply, spatial justice is the question that arises when a body desires to move into the space of another body.” There is an elegance and simplicity to this formulation, which on further interrogation, as we see in the chapters of this book, including Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ concluding remarks, becomes more complex as we delve further. For me, that is the excitement of investigating this territory, looking at the notions and practices of spatial justice through different lenses, different sites, spaces, and connections, as the authors in this volume set out to do.

In his chapter, David Herbert explores the implications of the digital permeation of the urban landscape for spatial justice. In so doing, he draws on research into the use of urban space in social media posts to display and contest social status. He suggests that despite easy access to social media technologies, rather than creating new and potentially disruptive forms of equality, they tend towards maintaining, reinforcing, and expanding social status distinctions and their embedding in space. Molotch and Ponzini take us away from the more common sites of urban theorists of the Global North, not to the also often-neglected cities of the Global South (see, for example, Robinson 2005), but to cities more usually associated with rapid urban development and vast wealth, as well as striking inequality, the cities on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf – Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Doha, which they term “showcase cities.” Such a focus disrupts and challenges many of the precepts of Western urban scholarship in significant ways, since these are places of limited democratic institutions and processes, and few avenues to civic or collective organisation for “rights to the city.” Thinking about spatial justice in such a context reframes the concerns, to throw into sharp relief questions of regimes of authority, technology, and labour, where developments displace populations and eat up land at a pace unknown in the European context, particularly. It also disrupts the notion of the city itself, questioning if these segregated Gulf places are indeed cities. They come to the rather dispiriting conclusion that Gulf cities aren’t the cause of world distress; rather, they display it and create models for spreading across the world.

Gary Bridge offers a rather different lens. Developing Barnett’s emphasis on the importance of moving forward from felt injustices and claims making to the rationalities of their contestation and evaluation, Bridge explores more deeply the resources for those intersubjective enquiries, looking at those aspects of everyday experience that involve non-discursive communication, expressive enquiry, and aesthetic experience to understand felt injustices. Here, he draws on the work of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, and his idea of transaction for considerations of justice, where objects and organisms are always in the process of co-constitution. This approach draws attention to the situation where competing claims are made, and what he calls the “quality of transactions of the live creature with her environment” which provides a measure of justice. In her chapter, Sophie Watson draws our attention to the matter of water and its constitution of relations of spatial injustice, not in terms of its scarcity or distribution, as is more usual, but instead focusing on the everyday cultural practices associated with water that are played out in city spaces with particular socio-cultural and political effects. In particular, she considers the purification rituals which are matters of concern for minority populations in cities, particularly Jewish and Muslim communities, that are largely invisible but which nevertheless enter the public sphere. Drawing on Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’ (2015) notion of spatial justice as the conflict between bodies that are moved by a desire to occupy the same space, she suggests that the practice of Wudu represents an articulation of purification in the context of unequal power relations – and as such is a site of spatial injustice.

Olga Sezneva, in her chapter, takes us to the city of Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad in Russia. In this fascinating account of the annexation of East Prussia post–Second World War, and the simultaneous expulsions of Germans from the land, Sezneva explores peoples’ sense of right and rightful ownership in the aftermath of violent appropriation. In this, she details how property was confiscated and the region was transformed into Russian Kaliningrad. Her concern here is in the ways in which an imposed amnesia takes place, under which lies an unsettling silence and complicated affective set of responses to the transfers that have occurred. In so doing, she explores how these practices of repossession have shaped the domestic and architectural objects of the city, and the lives of people who live there. Rooke and Von-Wissel, in their chapter, shift our gaze to the cultural sphere exploring the presence of pioneering artists and “creatives” in the city and the often temporary spaces they live and work in, arguing that artists and cultural sector organisations are significant actors in the management of urban change. Exploring an international cultural exchange Nine Urban Biotopes, which took place across seven cities in South Africa and the European Union between 2013 and 2015, they show how cultural organisations can find themselves caught between the ambitions of multiple stakeholders, engaged as they are in everyday situations that address social and spatial injustice as part of a critical and activist tradition, which itself can contribute to uneven spatial development. While those involved enable significant cultural value for a wider ensemble of highly mobile actors, they suggest that their practices also work to reinforce existing relations of power and privilege.

In his chapter, Francis Dodsworth explores women’s self-defence manuals, “the politics and poetics of women’s self-defence,” the cultural grammar through which the idea of women defending themselves was made conceivable, and the conditions of possibility that made something that we might call “spatial justice” meaningful and realisable. Here, he shows how these manuals drew on a dominant narrative at the time of the decline of British society, where crime was seen to be rising and out of control. In response, women were exhorted to shape their own environment and take responsibility for it, rather than to campaign more widely for strategies to address social or spatial justice more widely. Dodsworth suggests that the discursive resources were deployed in self-defence manuals for women with very different intentions from their use by “law and order” conservatives, turning them in new directions with new ends. Rather than emphasising women’s vulnerability and the need for patriarchal protection, the same language was mobilised to emphasise the inadequacy of patriarchal protection, the threat posed by men, and the capacity of women to protect themselves, rather than relying on a male protector or to restrict their own movement. Calafate-Faria’s chapter looks at spatial justice through the perspective of waste and borders, at different scales from the intimate and urban levels to the wider global and extra-terrestrial scales. In so doing, he discusses three types of processes through which spaces are emptied of their social and political value in order to fulfil the economic function of absorbing waste. He suggests that a useful lens for understanding the disposal of waste and the socio-spatial injustices it creates is through the perspective of discard and border studies. These conceptual tools are used to identify and discuss how the unequal geographies produced by waste produce the conditions for the reproduction of wastefulness. Calafate-Faria concludes by arguing the need for environmental sustainability thus poses, not a choice between individual and structural changes based on individual or diffuse responsibility. Rather, it forces us to understand the articulation between the various scales at which spatial dynamics create the conditions for the expansion of disposable economies.

Our final contribution to the collection is from Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Here, he reflects once more on the concept of spatial justice and how authors in this book have deployed the term, and in some cases his ideas, to consider their own concerns. He reaffirms the proposition that spatial justice is the question that arises when a body desires to move into the space of another body. As Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos observes, the definition used more widely in this book is the agonistic take on space and corporeality. In this chapter, he re-considers the definition through three elements: body, space, and movement. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos concludes by arguing that there is no resolution to our explorations – the questioning must always continue – we need to return to the lawscape to question our position and to dig deeper. For conflict will never disappear, nor will difference. Discourses may change, but what emerges could be less sharp, perhaps, and more accommodating.

References

1. Barnett, C. (2017) The Priority of Injustice: Locating Democracy in Critical Theory. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
2. Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice in the City. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.
3. Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space, trans. Nicholson-Smith, D. (first published in 1974 as La production de l’espace). Oxford: Blackwell.
4. Marcuse, P. (2009) “Spatial Justice: Derivative but Causal of Social Injustice”. Spatial Justice, September, http://www.jssj.org.
5. Merrifield, A. (2006) Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.
6. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, A. (2015) Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere. Abingdon: Routledge.
7. Rawls, J. (1972) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
8. Robinson, J. (2005) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London, New York: Routledge.
9. Soja, E. (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso.
10. Soja, E. (2009) “The City and Spatial Justice” [« La ville et la justice spatiale » traduction: Sophie Didier, Frédéric Dufaux], Justice spatiale | Spatial Justice | n° 01 septembre | September 2009.

Chapter 2

Social media and spatial justice

Instagram, place, and recursive logics of exclusion in North European cities

David Herbert

Introduction

“The city does not end with the visibly observable … urban spaces are becoming hybridized … meaning they are composed through a combination of physical and digital properties” (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011: 1, 14).

“In mediated societies … it is impossible to separate the recognition individuals get from each other from the way media resources are distributed” (Couldry 2011: 48).

This chapter examines the consequences for spatial justice of the digital permeation of the urban landscape, attempting to move towards a socio-spatial theory of critical agency in the digital city. It takes as its empirical starting point, the use of urban space in social media posts to display and contest status (e.g. by posting selfies from high status locations), the spatial distribution of these posts, and their relation to network formations (e.g. the clustering of influential users in prestigious neighbourhoods). It draws on findings from a comparative Norwegian–Dutch project Cultural Conflict 2.0¹ and the comparative Scandinavian project CoMRel (Engaging Religious Conflicts in Mediatised Environments),² which have examined the role of social media in shaping urban cultural dynamics in contemporary North European cities, including Oslo and Kristiansand in Norway, Copenhagen in Denmark, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands – very different cities in scale and diversity – which serve as cases to consider the impact of the introduction of a new media form for social relations in the urban environment.

While social media technologies are widely available and have a (relatively...