Social Spatialisation, Conflict and Spatial Justice


Rob Shields, University of Alberta

In what ways is justice not only social but necessarily spatial? This paper argues that struggles over place, space and worlding continue to be a key component of contemporary conflicts. The paper considers research on the relevance of social spatialisation to spatial justice in which all territories entail normative spatial practices, judgements and frames. Spatial justice as a problematic, links practices of resistance, social movements and even states of civil war. This challenges neoliberal and other procedural understandings of justice and those that tend to recast justice as a form of political struggle between interests. What are the spatialities of justice and ethics and how are they em-placed? The paper also extends notions of rights into the spatial, as a right-to-space or a right-to-land that may be applicable to land reform, land claims, property as land title, struggles over the identity of cultural territories and the loss of homelands and cultural territory by the exiled, colonized and those displaced by force.

This paper will be presented at the following session: