a critical evaluation on the concept of justice in planning process

2.5. Spatial Considerations Based on Justice Debate and Changes in
Planning Theories
The city planning activity is a way of spatial intervention realized in the aim of
organizing physical space. The fundamental purpose of physical space interventions,
which are held in public sphere by use of public power and consideration of public
benefit, is to attain the desired level of development and physical space organization.
This intervention in physical space aimed at encountering the spatial requirements of
society manifests that the discipline of planning is not independent from distributional
relations in terms of its purpose and tools both. As for these distributional relations
comprising distribution of opportunities, costs and urban benefit, they are influential
upon both the physical and the socio-economical structures.
Debate of justice in relation to these interventions in urban area has been
majored on with urban analysis studies of Castells and Harvey 32 from the perspective of
political economy.
Collective consumption and the rise of urban social movements constitute
Castells’ point of departure. Castells regards urban problems as connected with the
organization of common tools of consumption taking place on basis of daily life of all
social groups. In his opinion, the urban crisis is a special way of a more general crisis
exposed by the contradiction between productive powers and production relations
(Castell,1997,12-15).
Harvey, on the other hand, takes the history of urban development into
consideration by elucidating the capitalist process via its spatial impacts and how
severely it increases the inequalities in social space (Harvey, 1993). Harvey and Castells
both suggest that the basic problem of unequal development in urban spaces produced
under relations of capitalist production lies in relations of production (Fainstein, 1996).
In his first period studies, during which he has focused on inequality and justice,
Harvey dwells on how “just distribution justly arrived at” as referring to the resources in
a liberal society can be possible. He considers space within the integration of social
processes and spatial form and emphasizes the significance of social justice and its
principles in understanding this holistic relation (Harvey; 1993; 13-14). Rawls’
32 The first period studies mentioned here are namely Harvey’s Social Justice and the City (1993), and
Castells’ City, Class, Power (1997).
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