Spatial justice is not a single quality that can be measured on one axis. It is composed of three essential and mutually constitutive dimensions: recognition, procedure and distribution. These three are not alternatives, and they are not arranged in a sequence. They are co-constitutive. A planning process that distributes resources fairly but ignores who is permitted to speak, what languages are used, and whose ways of knowing are validated, has not produced spatial justice. A process that listens carefully but allocates poorly produces something equally incomplete. The three dimensions hold or fail together.

Distribution

The distributive dimension asks who gets what, where, and on what terms. It is concerned with the fair allocation of burdens and benefits across the urban field: housing, green space, transit, public services, cultural infrastructure, exposure to risk, and exposure to pollution. Distribution is the dimension that most planning practice already recognises, since the visible outputs of planning (a zoning map, a budget line, a metro stop in this neighbourhood rather than that one) are distributive in form. The challenge is to ask whether the allocation reproduces prior disadvantage or works against it.

Procedure

The procedural dimension asks how those allocations are arrived at. Who is in the room when decisions are taken? Whose voice counts, with what weight, at what stage of the process? Are participatory mechanisms binding or merely advisory? Are they accessible to people who do not speak the dominant language, do not own homes, work shifts that make evening meetings impossible? Procedural justice is the architecture of decision-making itself, and the way that architecture is built routinely determines what distribution becomes possible.

Recognition

The recognitional dimension asks whose identities, ways of life, and modes of knowing are made visible and treated as valid by the institutions doing the planning. Recognition is the cultural and institutional work of being seen. It is the dimension that operates upstream of the other two: the failure of recognition (a community deemed informal, a use of space deemed disorderly, a population whose presence is treated as a problem to be managed rather than a constituency to be served) routinely precedes the failures of distribution and procedure that follow from it.

From three to nine

The Conceptual Model unpacks each of these three dimensions into three operational components, producing the nine sub-dimensions shown in § 02 below. The nine components were not chosen to exhaust the field but to make the dimensions actionable. They are the lens through which a city’s plans, projects and processes can be examined in concrete terms, and they are the analytical units used by the Spatial Justice Benchmarking Tool to evaluate where a city stands and what it should reform.

The nine components are the analytical centre of the Conceptual Model, but they do not stand alone. Each component sits within a broader conceptual ecology: alongside foundational concepts such as dignity and equity, the rights and principles that anchor justice claims (right to the city, right to housing, right to water), the parallel justice traditions (climate, environmental, epistemic, mobility, housing) that share theoretical resources with spatial justice, the methods through which justice is enacted in practice (co-design, co-production, mapping, deliberation), the critical concepts that name the mechanisms of injustice (gentrification, dispossession, financialisation, segregation), the urban conditions that make justice questions urgent (informality, homelessness, displacement, ageing), and the theorists whose work has shaped the field.

The periodic table is the device through which this ecology is made visible. The 118 elements are organised so that location encodes meaning: rows track increasing complexity from foundational concepts to specific theorists, columns gather thematic families, and the bottom two rows hold the theorists whose work the field continues to draw upon (lanthanides as foundational, actinides as contemporary). The nine starred cells, shown in green with a star, are the components of the Conceptual Model. They sit inside the table rather than apart from it, so that the relationship between the analytical instrument and the wider field remains visible at a glance.

The table is a heuristic, not a closed system. The borders between categories are porous, and several entries could justifiably sit in another group. Its purpose is not classification but orientation. It gives students, practitioners and policy-makers a map of the conceptual terrain they are working within, and it lets any single concept be located in relation to the others. Click any cell to read its definition. The starred cells are then ready to be used in the workshop, the classroom, or the benchmarking session, with the rest of the vocabulary one click away.