Spatial Justice through the Lens of Comparative Urbanism

Abstract

The concept of justice was, and still is, widely debated. The work of Harvey and Lefebvre, in particular, has advanced our understanding of injustice and the processes through which it is systematically implemented. Today, however, we must deal with a multiplicity of agents, issues of planetary urbanisation, and struggles for the right to the city that confront complex mechanisms of appropriation, as the relations of production have evolved, and are still evolving, at a faster pace than in the past. The review aims, first, to depict the framework of the debate around “justice”, with significant emphasis on the so-called “spatial turn” and its implications for scholarship. Second, it proposes comparative urbanism as a viable methodology to investigate spatial (in)justices, as there is a growing need for methods able to stretch across differences in scale and social context.