Social Justice

Social justice is a normative concept concerning the ways in which resources and power should be shared across society. Most conceptions of social justice have something to do with social equality, although they differ in the ways in which they contend society should be equal.

Conceptions of social justice are geographic in a number of ways. First, they vary across space and time. Although attempts usually are made to solidify a particular understanding of social justice as universal, what constitutes social justice for one group of people in one place at one point in history does not necessarily do so for others. Social justice might mean something entirely different for striking union workers in Mexico City than it does for antiwar protesters in London. Second, social justice is concerned with the ways in which resources and power are shared across space. According to many conceptions of social justice, an entire city (not just a few neighborhoods) or the whole world (not just a handful of countries) should enjoy social equality. Along this line of thinking, some geographers, as well as social activists, have described the tendency for different places to develop uneven levels of prosperity and influence as socially unjust. Instead of having pockets of impoverished neighborhoods next to areas of great affluence, a more socially just geography might involve more spatial equity in the distribution of resources and the exercise of power. Third, notions of social justice are used to address social conditions on particular scales and in fact are integral to the construction of those scales. Measures of social justice have been applied regularly to the urban scale, although the concept is also used to evaluate and change social relations at the body, household, neighborhood, regional, national, and international scales. Consider, for instance, the meanings of social justice that have been used to make international human rights standards or those that have been struggled over when developing reproductive rights for women. Fourth, ideas of social justice often are inscribed right into the landscape, especially in the built environment. The presence, location, and conditions of public housing can say something about a society's conceptions of social justice, as can the presence (or absence) of adjacent high-rise office and apartment buildings. Fifth, ideas of social justice are also applied to inequities in the ways in which different people are forced to endure environmental problems. Environmental justice, as this view sometimes is called, seeks to eradicate dangers such as unsafe drinking water, polluted air, and lead poisoning that disproportionately affect people of color and other low-income communities.

Geographers and philosophers have identified and developed a few particular approaches to social justice that resemble, to greater or lesser degrees, popular attitudes and legislative agendas on the matter. Libertarian conceptions of social justice hold that everyone should have an equal opportunity, or starting point, to attain wealth and power regardless of what may happen thereafter. Unequal levels of income, therefore, would be considered socially just so long as everyone had the same chances to earn money from the beginning. This conception of social justice often is aligned with free market capitalism or neoliberalism. Advocates of this understanding of the concept argue that whatever inequities may emerge from the market are socially just outcomes because the conditions that structured the results ultimately were fair (so long as the market was allowed to operate properly).

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