Spatial justice: law and the geography of withdrawal

While spatial justice could be the most radical offspring of law’s recent spatial turn, it remains instead a geographically informed version of social justice. The majority of the existing literature on the subject has made some politically facile assumptions about space, justice and law, thereby subsuming the potentially radical into the banal. In this article, I suggest that the concept of spatial justice is the most promising platform on which to redefine, not only the connection between law and geography, but more importantly, the conceptual foundations of both law and space. More concretely, the article attempts two things: first, a radical understanding of legal spatiality. Space is not just another parameter for law, a background against which law takes place, or a process that the law needs to take into consideration. Space is intertwined with normative production in ways that law often fails to acknowledge, and part of this article is a re-articulation of the connection. Second, to suggest a conception of spatial justice that derives from a spatial law. Such a conception cannot rely on given concepts of distributive or social justice. Instead, the concept of spatial justice put forth here is informed by post-structural, feminist, post-ecological and other radical understandings of emplacement and justice, as well as arguably the most spatial of philosophical discourses, that of Deleuze–Guattari and the prescribed possibilities of space as manifold.

Law’s spatial turn: geography, justice and a certain fear of space

This is a critical reading of the current literature on law and geography. The article argues that the literature is characterized by an undertheorization of the concept of space. The focus is either on the specific geography of law in the form of jurisdiction, or as a simple terminological innovation. Instead, the article suggests that law’s spatial turn ought to consider space as a singular parameter to the hitherto legal preoccupation with time, history and waiting. This forces law into dealing with a new, peculiarly spatial kind of uncertainty in terms of simultaneity, disorientation, materiality and exclusionary corporeal emplacement. The main area in which this undertheorization forcefully manifests itself is that of spatial justice. Despite its critical potential, the concept has been reduced by the majority of the relevant literature into another version of social, distributive or regional justice. On the contrary, if the peculiar characteristics of space are to be taken into account, a concept of justice will have to be rethought on a much more fundamental level than that.

Territories of scarcity and creativity: a critical view of informal settlements and emerging tactics under conditions of scarcity in Nairobi, Kenya and Quito, Ecuador

This thesis explores the processes through which scarcity is constructed in informal settlements and how conditions emerging within its limits gives way to particular socio-spatial phenomena and influence the emergence of self-organisation and creative strategies from a non-expert perspective. At the same time, this thesis deconstructs these emerging tactics (reactive and transformative) in a diagrammatic way to generate a critical study of their potential for socio-spatial change that goes beyond the everyday survival. Most people associate scarcity with “not having enough” of something, most usually of a material nature. In contrast, this paper is based on the premise that scarcity is a constructed condition, therefore exploring it beyond its immediate manifestation and illustrating its discursive, distributive and socio-material components. In this line, the research uses Assemblage Theory as both an approach and a tool for analysis. This approach allows the research to depart from everyday narratives of the residents, and gradually evolve into a multi-scalar, non-linear reading of scarcity, by following leads into different realms and unpacking a series of routine events to uncover their connections to wider processes and particular elements affecting the settlement and the city as a whole. For this purpose, the research is based on a qualitative, flexible and multi-sited methodology, using different case studies as testing grounds. Collected data stems from a 11-months ethnographic fieldwork in informal settlements in Ecuador and Kenya, analysing the socio-spatial practices and strategies deployed by the different actors producing the built environment and arising from everyday and latent experiences of scarcity. The thesis examines the multi-scalar nature of these strategies, including self-building and management tactics, the mobilisation of grassroots organisations, the innovative ways of collaborating deployed by different coalitions and the reformulation of urban development policies. As outcomes of the research, the thesis will show illustrative diagrams that allow a better understanding of, firstly, the construction of scarcity in the built environment beyond its immediate manifestation and secondly, the way that emerging tactics a) improve existing conditions of scarcity, b) reinforce the status quo or c) contribute to the worsening of the original condition. Therefore, this thesis aims to offer lessons with both practical and theoretical considerations, by firstly, giving an insight into the complexity and transcalar nature of the construction of scarcity in informal settlements; secondly, by illustrating how acute conditions related to scarcity gives birth to a plethora of particular phenomena shaping the territory, social relationships and processes; and thirdly, by identifying specific characteristics within the informal that might allow for new readings of the city and possibilities for socio-spatial change under conditions of scarcity.