Realising social justice at the neighborhood scale

Parker, G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3079-4377 and Wargent, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1448-9383 (2025) Realising social justice at the neighborhood scale. In: Silverman, R. (ed.) The Handbook of Urban Planning and Social Justice. de Gruyter, Berlin. ISBN 9783111670157 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

This chapter focuses on the potential of neighborhood scale planning activity to help address questions of social justice, in particular drawing on recent experience in England. Our contention is that recognition of (in)justice is heavily influenced by scale and may be transliterated more effectively via hyper-local activity. As such we argue for greater understanding of how (in)justice is understood, recognized, and wrought at the hyper-local scale, with particular attention paid to how forms of representational and recognitional justice can be achieved in and through plans (cf. Lefebvre, 1991 / 1974; Brinkley and Wagner, 2022; Fraser, 1995; Fincher and Iveson, 2008). To do this we relate the experience of formalized Neighbourhood Planning in England since 2011. This focus seems apposite given ongoing debates over decentralization and localism in many nation states globally (Hartwich, 2013; Katz and Nowak, 2018), as well as longer-running efforts to target regeneration policy (Harris and Johnstone, 2003; Pinnegar, 2009; MHCLG, 2025). From this position we seek to build from practical discoveries of injustice as they relate dialectically with local and national scales. We do not seek to add to the substantial theoretical literature on social justice here but rather point towards the inscriptive power of plans and ask how these can perpetuate injustice, or otherwise act to highlight and propose action in relation to matters of spatial (in)justice (Brinkley and Wagner, 2022; Loh and Kim, 2021; Wagenaar, 2014; Connell, 2010; Baer, 1997; Forester, 1982).

Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/127827
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Henley Business School > Real Estate and Planning
Publisher	de Gruyter
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item