Spatial Justice & the Commons: Urban Sustainability Explained

The urban commons differs fundamentally from homogeneous public interest or public spaces. It is produced politically in response to pressures seeking to enclose it, representing the production of interactions and encounters in the city and collective action taken as a result. David Harvey describes commoning as a social practice producing relations with commons that are collective and non-commodified. Unlike traditional commons facing scarcity, urban commons may actually grow larger as more interactions occur around them. The ethical basis of commoning lies in its enactment of equality through shared commitment. Community services personnel can use governmental resources to enact commoning - forming communities of equals across difference in shared interests. Examples include maternal and infant healthcare services that struggle with multicultural demands while striving to provide universal access. The challenge is balancing identity-based funding with cross-group interaction programs, recognizing that people need acknowledged communities of familiars even as they reach out to new interactions.

Urban commoners such as street hawkers, refugees, and pavement dwellers transform public properties and turn them into collectively occupied spaces. These commons presuppose being in common or using resources in more or less shared and non-subtractable ways through practices. There are two crucial dimensions to the commons that urban commoners create: first, the commons are the source of livelihood and/or dwelling for them; second, they use the commons through variable local arrangements that are more or less egalitarian, incorporative, and fair in order to dwell and meet livelihood necessities. These commoners direct a portion of labor's use value to the growth and upkeep of the common resource. The bourgeois law of property sees these commons as unlawful possession or privatization and encroachment, criminalizing such practices. However, these commons develop as pockets in the shadow of property regime as subservient entities and often lose their separate identity as commons.

Commons emerge from movements against privatization and commodification, including information commons resisting knowledge monopolies and service commons opposing public service privatization. Commons provide alternatives to both market and state, developing at their periphery while requiring articulation with both. They challenge property as the dominant paradigm for resource exploitation, shifting focus from value of exchange to value of use. In African cities, commons can be public or private goods depending on social functions and collective action. Approaching urban spaces as commons means defending the city as collective space for all, enabling coproduction through stakeholder dialogue. Public authorities can adopt different postures: regulator, producer, or intermediary of commons.

Commoning is a concept that has emerged as a third option between private and public in recent debates. It involves organizing around a resource as a community and managing, fostering, and supporting this resource so that all benefit from it. From an urban and architectural perspective, spaces and processes can be designed as commons where communities take care of collective immaterial things they share and co-produce permanently. The urban school format creates conversations about the future of industrial areas, making conversations open and accessible to everybody by simply subscribing to a class. Public testing is a method for urban interventions where temporary installations are placed in public spaces for short periods, allowing the city to discuss whether it wants to have them permanently. This approach connects local conditions to international conditions through experience and meetings between tangible moments.

The Castle Community Garden in King's Cross, London demonstrates urban commons in practice. Established in the 1980s when residents successfully campaigned against selling green space for development, it evolved over 35 years into a multifunctional hub serving diverse community needs. The garden illustrates how communities transform neglected urban spaces through collective action, balancing informal beginnings with formal governance structures. Key features include growing spaces, a community kitchen, exercise areas, allotments, and relaxation spaces. The garden also implements circular economy principles through biodigesters converting food waste to energy and fertilizer, creating closed-loop systems that minimize waste and maximize resource efficiency.

Spatial justice requires life chances not be distributed geographically, just as social justice requires they not be distributed along class lines. Many cities are physically divided by features like railway lines, creating spatial injustice where life chances are dictated by zip codes. GIS provides powerful tools to map and address this. Street-level design allocates rights differently: Cambridge, Massachusetts follows the principle that larger vehicles have more rights to public space, while Gothenburg, Sweden democratizes streets with multiple street cars and cycle tracks, with only 10-15% for private vehicles. Research shows heavily trafficked streets have fewer social interactions, and low-income minority neighborhoods with high walk scores are most desirable. Urban planning should focus on what is possible rather than probable—the High Line happened because people went out on a limb. Hostile and defensive architecture (studs stopping skateboarders, armrest seats preventing homeless people) imposes spatial injustice by telling certain people they don't belong.

This section presents diverse perspectives from leading critical GIS scholars. Eric Sheppard connects spatial technologies to questions of society and technological development, tracing his journey from 1994 when critical human geographers began engaging with GIS. Mariana Pavlovska introduces critical GIS as enabling transformation away from racial capitalism and patriarchy toward solidarity economies, emphasizing that mapping is a process of creating understanding rather than just producing maps. Rena Gush shares her shift from physical to urban geography, driven by concerns about environmental justice and racial inequalities, highlighting her work with African American communities and indigenous history preservation. Jim Thatcher discusses districting as a core policy issue where computational approaches must be coupled with reflexive spatial thinking. Stacy Kowalczyk explores the Anthropocene through interdisciplinary projects like prairie restoration and ocean mapping, applying critical indigenous and race theory perspectives. Amy Glasmeier, a social worker turned GIS practitioner, demonstrates how mapping can privilege lived experience in policy advocacy, particularly in education equity and trans-affirming policies.

GIS mapping serves as both a tool for oppression and a mechanism for resistance in environmental justice work; effective environmental justice mapping requires critical awareness of how mapping practices can either perpetuate or challenge systemic inequities, incorporating community voices and diverse methodologies beyond traditional spatial analysis to address distributive, procedural, and recognitional dimensions of environmental injustice.

Spatial justice refers to the equitable distribution of essential societal needs (health, education, employment, environment) and undesirable conditions (environmental risks, insecurity) across geographic space, recognizing that social injustice manifests through exploitation, marginalization, segregation, and cultural imperialism, and that spatial analysis provides both analytical categories to understand justice and practical tools to modify territorial arrangements for more equitable outcomes.

GIS mapping serves as a powerful tool for anti-poverty advocacy. In the Avondale Glen case, a company offered residents $500 cash and a $200 gasoline card in exchange for mineral rights beneath their homes, with plans to pump 7.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas into bedrock beneath homes. Maps showed that two gas potential areas were in largely white areas while the area of highest concentration of African American and people of color was being targeted. Another map showed gas fields crossing major highways, which the state objected to as too dangerous. Color grading showed concentrations of people of color ranging from 52% to 91%, with pie charts showing poverty rates reaching 94% in the darkest green area. Maps also showed existing environmental burdens including refuse facilities, toxic release sites, and Superfund sites. In the Butte County case, a dot map showing where mental health consumers lived revealed that while intuitively everyone knew mentally ill people concentrated in downtown, people actually lived in rural areas and were being served by satellite clinics close to them. Removing satellite clinics would eliminate access to care. This map alone caused the city council to take the matter off calendar for further study.

This segment addresses how participatory democracy processes move from proven pilots to fundamental systems change. Jane Dron, fundraiser for PBP, explains that PB is about 35 years old globally and 16 years old in the US, at a critical pivot point. New York City created a civic engagement commission through a ballot initiative after years of PB at the council level. Boston's Office of Participatory Budgeting was started after youth-led PB processes demonstrated value. Portland, Oregon has been working to institutionalize PB after successful youth processes. Cleveland attempted to write PB into the city budget process for a specific percentage, though this narrowly lost. The key challenge is ensuring institutionalization expands power rather than boxing in processes. Models include Boston's approach tying PB to youth employment programs and Cambridge's 10-11 year PB process run by the city's budget office. The segment also addresses accountability mechanisms, noting that assemblies can range from advisory recommendations with government responses to permanent rotating bodies with agenda-setting power, and discusses the need for civic infrastructure and ecosystem approaches to build legitimacy and sustainability.

Effective participatory budgeting requires institutionalization to survive political transitions. Mérida's participatory budgeting program is protected by municipal regulations that allocate a percentage of municipal revenue to citizen participation. This institutionalization ensures that programs persist through changes in political leadership, addressing the challenge of maintaining citizen engagement across electoral cycles.

The institutional architecture supporting participatory budgeting involves developing normative frameworks and organizational structures. In Medellín, the process began under the Plan de Desarrollo framework until institutionalized in 2007 through Acuerdo 1, which modified the municipal planning system by introducing Chapter 5 on local planning and participatory budgeting. Subsequent modifications occurred in 2010, 2013, 2017, and 2020. The architecture includes internal organizational structures with zonal teams and cross-secretariat coordination, strong articulation between participatory processes and planning processes, and coordination with local administrative councils. The relationship between participatory budgeting and local planning is crucial, with resources often linked to development local planning projects. Challenges include political sustainability, as institutionalization depends heavily on political will and the specific context of each administration.

Participatory budgeting emerged in Brazil in 1989 near the end of the military dictatorship, arising from social movements demanding democratization. The concept was developed by the union of residents who argued that since the majority contributes to the public budget, they should decide how it is distributed. Brazilian intellectual Sosa identified three basic elements: open participation to any citizen, combination of direct and representative democracy, and availability of resources for investments. In Mexico, it was implemented in 2003 in Tlalpan, Cuauhtémoc, and Miguel Hidalgo, with the current implementation beginning in 2011 under Marcelo Ebrard's government. The institutional framework includes the Electoral Institute, Head of Government, Legislative Assembly, citizen committees, the Annual Operational Program, and the Annual Budget Decree. Resources correspond to 3% of each delegation's annual budget, divided among territorial units.

Participatory budgeting emerged from a utopian vision of direct deliberative democracy, arising from criticism that traditional political systems fail to represent citizens' interests. It gained constitutional recognition in Brazil through a popular plebiscite with over 12 million signatures. The process began in Porto Alegre in 1989 and has become increasingly institutionalized, though it has shifted from an insurgent movement to a more formalized state structure. Despite institutionalization, challenges remain in representing the broader population, as participation rates in São Paulo show approximately 3,000-4,000 proposals from a population of 10 million.