Centre for the Just City

# The Spatial Justice Package is live

For the past two years, work inside the Horizon Europe UP2030 project has produced a set of tools meant to do one specific job: help planners, students and policymakers move from talking about spatial justice to actually practising it. Those tools now have a permanent home. The [Spatial Justice Package](https://just-city.org/spatial-justice-package/) brings together a conceptual model, a planning cycle, a benchmarking tool and a companion handbook, built by Roberto Rocco, Juliana Gonçalves, Hugo Lopez and Marcin Dabrowski at the Centre for the Just City, TU Delft.

Each element was tested with the people who would actually use it. The framework was stress-tested at the *Spatial Justice in Practice* symposium in November 2023, with the UP2030 consortium’s pilot cities, universities and technology partners acting as testbed and critical audience throughout. Four of those elements now also live as standalone, interactive pages of their own, each built for classroom use, workshop prep, or a quick link to send a colleague.

## A conceptual model, in nine components

Spatial justice is easy to gesture at and hard to operationalise. The [Conceptual Model](https://just-city.org/conceptual-model/) breaks it down into three dimensions and nine components, giving the term a shared vocabulary rather than a slogan. Each component links forward to the point in the planning cycle where it actually does work, so the model reads as an instrument rather than a diagram.

## A planning cycle, in ten steps

Models need a sequence to operate in. The [TU Delft Spatial Planning Cycle](https://just-city.org/the-tu-delft-spatial-planning-cycle/) sets out ten steps, deliberately non-linear and participatory, for embedding the nine components into the ordinary business of drawing up a plan. It is the piece that turns the conceptual model from a way of thinking into a way of working.

## A benchmarking tool, not a scorecard

The hardest part of any framework is finding out whether it is being followed. The [Benchmarking Tool](https://just-city.org/spatial-justice-benchmarking/) scores a plan or project against the same nine components, across five levels of maturity. It is built to start a conversation about where a plan falls short, not to hand down a verdict.

## A handbook, for the longer read

For readers who want the full argument, not just the tools, the [Spatial Justice Handbook Companion](https://just-city.org/spatial-justice-handbook-companion/) is the practitioner’s guide behind the package: theory, cases and method, field-tested across nine UP2030 pilot cities and edited by Rocco, Gonçalves, Lopez and Dąbrowski.

## A periodic table, for the long list

Alongside the core four sits the [Spatial Justice Periodic Table](https://just-city.org/the-spatial-justice-periodic-table/), 118 elements organised under the same three dimensions and nine components. Where the conceptual model gives the structure, the periodic table gives the detail, one element at a time.

## Explore the whole package

The [Spatial Justice Package hub](https://just-city.org/spatial-justice-package/) is the place to start: it walks through all five resources in sequence and links out to each standalone page. Everything in the package is free to use in teaching, workshops and practice. If you use it in a course or a project, we would like to hear how it goes.