Justice as a criterion for assessing the ‘quality’ of urban space (and the happiness of its residents)

• Main Author: I. V Trotsuk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN University) 2020-12-01
• Series: RUDN journal of Sociology
• Subjects: social justice; urbanism; urban space; social-spatial differentiation; urban theory; interdisciplinary approach; social well-being; happiness
• Online Access: http://journals.rudn.ru/sociology/article/viewFile/24547/18575

The article is a review-reflection on the book by D. Harvey Social Justice and the City (Moscow: New Literary Review; 2018). Despite the fact that social justice is in the title of the book as its focus, the researcher of justice would be disappointed, because justice is rather a cross-cutting idea of the political-economic analysis of the spatial organization of the city; however, the results of this analysis would inevitably make the reader think in terms of justice-injustice. Such a presentation of justice together with the eclectic text can become advantages of the book for researchers of social well-being: if the place of residence is a criterion of life satisfaction, the quality of the place of residence (including fair urban planning and the type of social differentiation of the urban space) significantly influences social well-being, which the author shows very convincingly in both liberal and socialist (in his terms) discourses, but clearly prefers the Marxist methodology supplemented by some other conceptual approaches.