Spatial planning does more than organise land uses and coordinate development. Through maps, classifications and procedures, it makes some people, places, relations and futures visible while leaving others outside the frame of public action. In doing so, it shapes what can be governed, whose claims count and which forms of life can endure. A river, for example, may enter planning as a resource or legal object. It may also exist as a living ancestor or a relation of collective life. These are not always rival interpretations of an otherwise settled thing. They may be different spatial realities, sustained through different practices and carrying different obligations. The conflict becomes unjust when only one of these realities has the institutional authority to shape maps, licences, property rights, compensation and repair, while the others must translate themselves into its terms.

This symposium invites theoretically ambitious and empirically grounded contributions on spatial injustices and justices across diverse ontologies, and on how they are understood across different geographies. The symposium will serve as both a forum for collective argument and a formative stage in developing the edited volume with the working title Geographies of Spatial Justice and Injustice. Our aim is not to assemble a catalogue of cultural perspectives on space. Instead, we examine how worlds are materially made, how some accounts acquire institutional authority over others, how people negotiate or refuse that authority, and what justice requires in response.

Spatial justice begins with a powerful insight: space is made and remade through institutions, capital, law, political struggle and everyday life. Once we understand space in these terms, questions about who receives resources and bears risks, who participates in decisions, and whose identities and ways of life are recognised become central to spatial planning and analysis. The Centre for the Just City brings these concerns together in its Spatial Justice model: fair recognition, fair process and fair distribution provide three connected lenses through which justice claims can be evaluated.

The model remains indispensable, but it can enter the argument too late. By the time we ask whether recognition, process and distribution are fair, the entities, subjects and scales of justice may already have been defined. Land may already have become property, a river a resource, the city a bounded administrative object, and nature an external domain to be protected or exploited. People can then contest ownership, use, meaning or value, while one modern account of reality continues to determine what the dispute is about.

Colonial modernity refers here to the unequal power to make one world institutionally real. Property law, zoning, maps, cadastres and professional expertise do more than order and govern territories. They help determine what territory is, which relations within it become visible, and whose account of it can acquire legal and political authority. Other worlds have not disappeared. They persist through adaptation, resistance, refusal and uneasy coexistence. The challenge for spatial justice is both to explain how their subordination is reproduced and to identify what repair would require of land relations, authority, institutions and knowledge.

The distinction between epistemic and ontological plurality is central to the symposium.

The boundary between the two is not clear-cut, since knowing and being cannot be neatly separated. Yet the distinction changes the political stakes. A planning process may invite Indigenous or local knowledge while continuing to assume that the river, forest or territory in question is ultimately the same object for everyone. Voice is broadened, but the reality upon which planning is authorised to act remains unchanged.

Our use of the pluriverse does not imagine worlds as sealed cosmologies, nor does it place every claim beyond judgement. Worlds are historical, contested from within and materially entangled with one another. Practices defended in the name of a local ontology may reproduce gendered, racialised, class and generational hierarchies. Scholars can also romanticise communities, separate ontological difference from the political economy of exploitation, or appropriate Indigenous thought. Taking the pluriverse seriously therefore requires critique across worlds. It also requires us to examine the position from which judgement is made, so that no single world can present its own categories as neutral or universally binding.