In the past decades, and even more so in the last ‘crisis’ years, issues of inequalities, oppression and domination are increasingly discussed and debated, particularly regarding social paradigms, policies and developmental models (MacLeod and McFarlane, 2014). Thus, the sense and the realities of injustice, as well as its amelioration, have become significant stakes not only for legal justice but for the broader terrain of social policy (Young, 1990).

The concept of spatial justice is in many ways important for the proposed research. On a first level, it is a useful tool for measuring inequalities in an urban context: if spatial justice simply means an equal access to those goods and services that the urban condition potentially provides, then inequalities indeed can be studied as they are expressed in practices of inhabitation. As Edward Soja claims, “Justice has spatial dimensions and the equitable distribution of resources, services and access is a basic human right” (Soja, 2010). UCLA’s Critical Planning group categorizes injustices as they are represented in space (Bassett 2013). This conceptualization of socio-spatial justice incorporates issues raised by UNESCO concerning poverty as a violation of human rights, and aims at expanding the notion and practice of rights by rooting them to the urban terrain (Carmalt, 2018; Delaney, 2016).

On a second level, connecting justice to space may be a gesture that re-conceptualizes both justice and the meaning of space (Marcuse et. al. 2009). Instead of merely adding spatial aspects to the functioning of justice, instead of projecting the results of social injustice on cities, spatial justice may become the term through which justice may be rethought (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2007; Dikeç 2007; Iveson 2011). We know that laws are specific space-bound forms of regulation of human acts and behaviour. Jurisdiction is an immanently spatial term; it describes the area in which a certain law is valid and in which a certain authority has the power to enforce it. But justice and injustice are not simply expressed in space. They shape spaces and are shaped through and by space. Space is both a stake to be claimed and distributed through demands and acts of justice but also the means through which demands, claims and acts are shaped (Fincher and Iveson, 2012).

Spatial justice may thus help us study the different ways in which space is both shaped by claims and struggles for justice but also shapes ideas, dreams and models for justice. This will “shift focus from spatial manifestations of injustice to structural dynamics that produce and reproduce injustice through space” (Dikeç 2009; Marcuse 2009; Brawley, 2009). Spatial justice or injustice (or various grades of them) are being expressed and shaped through the spatiality of policies and the spatiality of agency. This is why we choose to follow a line of reasoning and research inaugurated by Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city” (1996; see also Harvey 1996). This is not simply one more right that may be added for example to the right of privacy or to the right to health care or cultural dignity. It is not the right to live in cities and to enjoy what cities may theoretically provide to each and every one. It is the right to collectively reshape the city as a commonly produced work of art –as an “oeuvre” (Lefebvre 1996: 157,174) and not as a “product”. Lefebvre’s “right to the city” idea retains a crucial potentiality of the term of spatial justice: justice has to do with space but, more than that, justice is being shaped through practices that give form to space (also Mitchel 2003).