Spatial Justice in Urban Planning (Second Edition)

Dear Colleagues,

Cities are contradictory places in which the benefits of improved access to economic opportunities, public goods, services, and amenities are accompanied by heavy economic, social, and environmental burdens in terms of traffic congestion, housing unaffordability, air pollution, and environmental hazards. The uneven distribution of such benefits and burdens of urban development across urban individuals differentiated by class, gender, race, ability, and other social markers lead to various forms of social exclusion and injustice, often putting disproportionate burdens on the lives of disadvantaged urban dwellers.

Spatial dimension is an integral part of social justice (Soja, 2010), as urban spaces, places, landscapes, and built environments inhabited by different categories of urbanites play a significant role in determining and shaping not only the spatial location and accessibility of urban benefits and burdens but also urban inhabitants’ power and capabilities to partake in the negotiation and deliberation of rules governing the use and management of urban land and space. Interrogating social-spatial (in)justice in cities involves distributive justice concerning the social-spatial unevenness of benefits and disbenefits for different social groups, as well as recognitional and procedural justice bearing upon the social-spatial inclusion/exclusion of diverse actors/agencies in urban planning and spatial management processes (Fainstein, 2010).

From a social-spatial justice perspective, all urban dwellers, regardless of their socio-economic backgrounds, should have equal rights and opportunities to use, transform, and reproduce their inhabited city according to the urban lifestyle choices they value (Israel and Frenkel, 2018). The pursuit of and contestation over social-spatial justice is most acutely reflected in the “urban land nexus” (cf. Scott and Storper, 2015) marked by variegated diversity and the interpenetration of the production space of work and employment, the social space of residential neighborhoods, and the circulation space of infrastructure and mobility connections. The advocacy for social-spatial justice provides a new lens for urban researchers, policy practitioners, and justice activists to reflect upon and re-evaluate diverse urban forms, spatial structures, (re)development processes, and policy interventions at city and metropolitan scales whose effects and outcomes have hitherto paid inadequate attention to the normative criterion of social-spatial equity. To fill this gap, this Special Issue calls for conceptual, theoretical, methodological, empirical, and exploratory papers that can contribute to our understanding of the complex interrelationships among justice, society, and space in diverse urban governance settings. We welcome both original research articles and reviews and particularly encourage submissions from a critical and multi-disciplinary perspective. Research themes may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Social-spatial (in)justice in urban redevelopment
• Suburbanization, gentrification, and social-spatial exclusion
• Urban sprawl, compact cities, and social-spatial justice
• Equity and justice in informal and affordable housing
• Social-spatial (in)justice in urban public space
• Greening and inclusive urban development
• Spatial and environmental justice in urban ecosystem services
• Urban mobility and spatial justice
• Spatial equity and justice in urban planning and governance

References:

Soja, E.W. Seeking spatial justice. University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Fainstein, S. The just city. Cornell University Press, 2010

Israel, E. and Frenkel, A. Social justice and spatial inequality: Towards a conceptual framework, Progress in Human Geography, 2018, 42 (5): 647-665

Scott, A.J. and Storper, M. The nature of cities: The scope and limits of urban theory, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2015, 39 (1): 1-15.

Dr. Fox Zhiyong Hu
Prof. Dr. Wendy Yan Chen
Dr. Izzy Yi Jian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Land is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• social-spatial justice
• distributional and procedural justice
• urban redevelopment
• environmental justice
• green gentrification
• right to the city
• segregation and discrimination
• urban political ecology
• capital and capability
• co-production

• Spatial Justice in Urban Planning in Land (6 articles)