Spatial Justice and Planning:
Reshaping Public Housing Communities in a Neoliberal World
The question of how just societies and cities can be organised and achieved has long been central to planning. Spatial justice presents an integrative and unifying theory concerning place, policies, people, and their interplay. In conjunction with state housing redevelopment in New Zealand, an integrated analytical framework comprising a geographical morphological study, housing policy and plan analysis and embodiment research is established to investigate the spatiality of (in)justice and the (in)justice of spatiality. The complex layering of spatial-temporal and social landscapes resulting from dynamic spatial processes forms the basis for community characterisation and assessment and provides a new lens to uneven development geographies. Spatial justice supports the formulation of process strategies for fulfilling both valued development outcomes and representational ideas.
The Fenchurch area in Glen Innes in Auckland (Author’s photograph, 2020)