Social and Spatial Justice

About the research group

Major recent crises such as the financial crisis in 2008 and the current Covid-19 pandemic expose and magnify inequalities in society. With every such crisis new (and enduring) imaginaries of a supposedly better society come to the fore to suggest how to transition towards better futures. For every such future, however, there is a need to critically interrogate whose interests the transition represents and serves, how it is implemented and ultimately winners and losers of different pathways would be.

The collective purpose and mission of the research group is to publish interdisciplinary research on social and spatial justice in three on-going and mutually related transitions: (1) green transitions, (2) participatory turns, and (3) smart digitalisation. In the context of each transition, we study critical questions relating to the social and spatial justice of (a) transition methods, (b) transition trajectories, and (c) transition outcomes. This is illustrated in Figure 1:

Green transitions cover a variety of coordinated efforts to enact societal transformations that break away from prevailing trajectories to make way for more sustainable futures. Changes induced by green transitions are asymmetrical, affecting different social groups and places differently with social and spatial injustice as ‘collateral damage’. Participatory turns refer to the increased emphasis on citizen inclusion and participation in decision-making and development processes across planning, design, architecture, etc. Transitions toward participation are ripe with social and spatial justice concerns, especially where vulnerable and marginalised populations are concerned. Smart digitalisation covers the rapid uptake of new technologies in societal planning, management, and regulation, especially of devices connected to the Internet of Things and the rising capability for producing, processing, and using big data. Justice concerns include surveillance and the reduction of citizens to data points, algorithmic violence, and the tendency to design technological solutions and algorithms for an imagined average citizen.

The three transitions are closely related. For instance, smart digitalisation is often implemented as part of attempts to enact green transitions with increasing attention being paid to citizen participation and inclusion of vulnerable groups. This is prominently exemplified by the Roadmap for Smart and Sustainable Cities and Communities in Norway (DOGA, 2019) and the European Mission on Climate Neutral and Smart Cities (European Commission, 2020). To achieve all three transitions in a coordinated manner that advances social and spatial justice is a major challenge both for academic research and planning practice. The core members of the group have recently submitted an NFR application responding to this challenge.

By facilitating close dialogue among the cross-cutting perspectives on socio-spatial transition justice, the research group will enable a cross-fertilisation of ideas to mutually strengthen publication quality and novelty. Every publication cannot focus on all transitions and dimensions at once, but as a whole publications will explore common theoretical and methodological approaches that allow the group to conceptualise a broader research agenda for how to understand questions of social and spatial justice and to critically engage with how societal transitions produce and reproduce inequalities. In this sense, the publication project forms part of a longer-term strategy of bringing together our various international networks in new collaborative constellations around this shared research agenda. In short, the publication project is synergistic with our networking efforts. Group members are engaged in multiple empirical projects and settings. This is exploited through data sharing – getting new eyes on old data – and by combining existing datasets to allow for new insights to emerge. The broad geographical focus of the group in relation to transitions enables the cross-fertilisation of emerging and established insights into local and global similarities and differences, while also sowing seeds for future collaboration.