A genealogy of the five schools of justice in planning thought

Abstract

Justice is one of the main goals of planning thought which has been widely accepted by scholars over various periods. Due to its specific historical, social, moral, and philosophical characteristics, various theories in the field of justice in planning have been put forward, but so far no study has been conducted to explore and describe justice schools of planning thought. To this end, the main objective of this article is to explore a genealogy of the justice schools in planning thought. Accordingly, five equity, communicative, just, critical-spatial, and southern schools of thought were identified in the field of urban studies and planning. The results indicate that justice schools in planning thought have evolved from the equity in the 1960s to the critical-spatial flow and south global schools in the millennium, with an emphasis on distributive/redistributive and procedural dimensions in the face to social-economic inequalities. Besides, the notion of space is also evolved from an absolute concept through the school of equity into a dialectical and relational concept within the critical-spatial and southern schools. Hence, space is not a subjective or objective entity but it is a social reality. Examination of these schools shows that they have been formed by the specific historical, social, moral, and philosophical characteristics govern that society. However, there has been a lot of criticism of each of these schools, which is mainly driven by their philosophical and epistemological origins; even though historical and geographical contexts have also been effective in these critiques. That is a fact that the lack of understanding of the roots of schools of thought is led to exacerbate conceptual tensions in this regard. This article is a solution to these tensions.