Most benchmarking instruments compress a city into a single figure: a rank, an index score, a position on a league table. The Spatial Justice Benchmarking Tool refuses that move deliberately. It is a qualitative evaluation tool designed to help urban practitioners reflect on whether, and how, justice is being addressed in planning, governance and design — through a structured conversation among stakeholders that surfaces blind spots, exclusions and institutional rigidities a single number would flatten.

Why nine components, not one number

A composite score invites comparison between cities that erases the different starting conditions each began from, and it rewards whichever city is best at producing favourable metrics rather than whichever city is doing the harder, slower work of structural change. The SJBT keeps the nine components of the Conceptual Model separate and visible for exactly this reason. A city can score well on Allocation while scoring poorly on Democratic Engagement, and that gap is the finding, not noise to be averaged away.

Who should be in the room

The exercise is grounded in the nine components: for a given vision, plan, project or initiative, participants score each component against a five-step scale from Low to Embedded, and, more importantly, they record the disagreements, insights and recommendations behind the score. Run with only planning staff in the room, the exercise reproduces the planning department’s own blind spots. It is intended for workshops, classrooms and public forums, and is available in a citizen version and a policy-maker version precisely so that both perspectives can be scored, and their gaps compared, rather than assuming one version speaks for the other.

Pick one live vision, plan, project or initiative you know well, and score each of the nine components against the five-level scale above. This is a compressed, single-user version of an exercise meant to be run with a room full of disagreeing stakeholders — treat your result as a prompt for that conversation, not a verdict on its own.

The printable evaluation board comes in two versions because the same nine components read differently depending on where a participant sits. The policy-maker version uses the vocabulary of planning practice — allocation mechanisms, governance instruments, institutional capacity — and assumes some fluency with how a municipal process actually works. The citizen version reframes each component in plain, concrete language, asking about a park a resident actually uses rather than an abstraction the department is committed to.

Run separately and then compared, the two boards routinely disagree, and the disagreement is the finding worth discussing. A department that rates itself Advanced on Democratic Engagement while residents rate the same process Low or Emerging has located, precisely, where its participatory process is failing to land.