The Spatial Justice Package is the TU Delft Centre for the Just City's structured response to a recurring question from cities, planners and policy-makers: how do we move spatial justice from theory into practice? Rather than offer a single tool or a single framework, the package gathers six interlocking resources — a conceptual model, a planning cycle, a benchmarking instrument, a handbook, a workshop format and a symposium archive — that can be used individually or as a coherent ensemble.

The package was developed within the Horizon Europe project UP2030 (Urban Planning and Design Ready for 2030), where TU Delft leads a Work Package on benchmarking spatial justice. Its purpose is to give cities transitioning towards climate neutrality a way of asking whether their transitions are also just — and a vocabulary, a method and an evaluation grid for answering that question with their stakeholders.

The resources gathered here are open access. They are intended for cities working on transitions, planning professionals, public servants, civic organisations, and university programmes in urbanism, architecture, public policy and political science.

The Conceptual Model is the analytical spine of the package. It conceptualises spatial justice as three interconnected and mutually reinforcing dimensions — distributive, procedural and recognitional — and unpacks each into three operational components. The nine components below are the ones the model puts to work in evaluation, planning and policy design.

Each dimension answers a different question. Distributive justice asks who gets what, where and on what terms. Procedural justice asks how those decisions are made, by whom and with what voice. Recognitional justice asks whose values, identities and ways of life are visible to the institutions doing the planning.

The nine components do not stand alone. They sit inside a wider vocabulary of rights, principles, justice traditions, methods, critical concepts, urban conditions and the theorists who have shaped the field. We have organised that vocabulary here as a periodic table — useful for orientation, teaching and locating any one concept within the broader conversation.

The nine starred cells are the components of the Conceptual Model. The rest of the table is the company they keep. Click any cell to read what it means.

The Spatial Justice Benchmarking Tool (SJBT) is a qualitative evaluation tool. It is designed to help urban practitioners reflect on whether — and how — justice is being addressed in a city's planning, governance and design processes. The point is not a number on a dial. The point is a structured conversation among stakeholders that surfaces blind spots, exclusions and institutional rigidities.

The tool is grounded in the nine components of the Conceptual Model. 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. It is intended for workshops, classrooms and public forums; it is also available in a citizen version and a policy-maker version.

The symposium Spatial Justice in Practice: Benchmarking Spatial Justice in Policymaking, Planning and Design — held at TU Delft on 30 November 2023, with online sessions on 1 and 5 December — was the moment at which the Conceptual Model and the early SJBT were exposed to the international community working on these questions. Three days, six thematic tracks, eight organisers across four institutions.

The symposium produced a Book of Abstracts that gathers the contributions submitted across the six tracks. Selected papers fed into a special issue and an edited volume on benchmarking spatial justice.

The package benefited from the wider Centre for the Just City and the UP2030 consortium. Andrés Maglione (University of Naples Federico II), Russell Smith (Winston-Salem State University) and Shahryar Sarabi (University of Utrecht) sat on the organising committee of the 2023 symposium that stress-tested the early model. The UP2030 consortium partners — the pilot cities, the universities and the technology SMEs — were the audience, the testbed and the critical interlocutors throughout.