Geography of the just and the unjust

As an echo of the yellow vest mobilizations, which place the problem at the heart of public debate, Jacques Lévy’s latest work, Spatial Justice Theoryan assumed reference to the famous Theory of justice by John Rawls, offers a spatial analysis of social inequalities.

The geographer, who recently won the Vautrin-Lud Prize, considered by some to be the Nobel Prize of the discipline, has teamed up for the occasion with Jean-Nicolas Fauchille and Ana Povóas, two urban planners with whom he is used to collaborating. Based on surveys conducted among European citizens and a careful reading of the great theorists of justice, from Aristotle to Amartya Sen, including John Rawls and Robert Nozick, the book explores the spatial dimensions of justice. While the idea is not new in geography (Brennetot, 2011), the originality of the book lies in the space given to the testimonies of ordinary citizens on a subject that is, at least in appearance, so theoretical and complex. At a time when geography seems to be making a comeback in public debate, the three researchers show, without caricatures (but not without sparking some controversy!), how geography can renew the questioning of justice in democratic regimes.

The authors’ thesis can be summed up as follows: the rise of mobility gives individuals the choice of the territory in which they wish to live. But this choice implies responsibilities. Living in a low or high density area does not have the same implications and it must be up to each person to assume the consequences (in financial terms as well as in terms of access to services) according to a principle of justice.

A new geography is born

Due to the decline of the agricultural sector and the mobility revolution, France experienced a significant rural exodus in the last century. “By minimizing time-distances (…), the automobile has considerably increased the freedoms to ‘make do with space'” (p. 48). This revolution in spatial freedoms, made possible by the considerable drop in transport costs, has been accompanied by a spread of cities on their outskirts, so much so that the countryside and the city are no longer separate realities. The rural has become a spatial dimension of the urban among others (Lévy, 1996a). However, the three researchers consider that the urbanity gradient, understood as the degree of density (of people and things) and diversity (sociological and functional) of a territory, strongly influences social life, as would also be illustrated by the new maps of politics which show links between the choice of vote and the place of residence (Lévy, 2007). “To live is always to share a habitat with others, therefore to cohabit,” the authors tell us, because “to live always relates to the political dimension of the social world.” In short, space says something about what we are and what we would like to be.

This evolution of the world therefore requires us to rethink the idea of ​​justice. To do this, the authors propose to question those most concerned: citizens, without political function or commitment. The latter manage a priori without difficulty in formulating discourses on justice that go beyond their personal lives and, above all, give a large place to space. For Lévy, Fauchille and Povóas, this is proof that they must be listened to and involved more. But, if the rise of mobility gives individual citizens new freedoms, in particular to choose where they want to live, these freedoms in return oblige them to more responsibilities. Choosing peri-urban or rural areas would thus imply assuming the consequences of distance from the city centre: high costs of mobility, lower presence of public services and various facilities, etc.

Between equality and freedom, must we choose?

If our geography has changed because our lifestyles have evolved, our governance frameworks are struggling to adapt. In a France that has become both mobile and urban, the old institutions, sometimes predating the industrial revolution, are maintained. Although shaken by the reforms carried out in recent decades, the department-municipal pair thus continues to structure French political life. In the same way, the left-right divide, partly dynamited by the election of Emmanuel Macron to the presidency of the Republic, has organized the public debate from the end of the Revolution of 1848 to the present day. Lévy, Fauchille and Povóas summarize it as a clash between two discourses: that of liberty, carried by the right, and that of equality, defended by the left. A dichotomy that would find roots in the writings of three authors, Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Seeking to differentiate themselves from the rest of the socialism of the time, considered utopian, Marx and Engels wanted to breathe new life into a more contested and realistic way. Opposing the oppressors to the oppressed, the two authors criticized bourgeois society which, “raised on the ruins of feudal society”, had not managed to abolish the class struggle. Based on this observation, they became the defenders of a radical version of equality at the expense of justice and freedom. Conversely, drawing on the example of the United States, Tocqueville suggested placing freedom first, to the detriment of well-being, and defended the principle of “equality in freedom”. This opposition, between supporters of freedom and supporters of equality, is later found in opposing debates, in economics, the socialist left in favor of the adoption of an egalitarian project, leaving a large place for the State, and the neoliberal right in favor of the liberalization of markets and the principle of freedoms/responsibilities.

The paths to equity

So should we marry Marx and Tocqueville? This is, in a way, what the sociologist Anthony Gibbens proposed at the end of the 1980s by laying the foundations of a “third way”, understood in its contemporary sense. Rejecting back to back models that he considered ideological and obsolete, Gibbens proposed to reconcile freedom and equality thanks to a new division of labor associating the State (dealing with equality) and the business world (in charge of freedom). A proposal also defended in similar terms, a few years earlier, by John Rawls in his Theory of justice which proposed, starting from a principle of equality of opportunity and a principle of difference, to place equity at the heart of thinking about justice. This hypothesis led him to make the State a guarantor responsible for ensuring the same opportunities for everyone so that everyone can choose their life path. But, as Lévy, Fauchille and Povóas also show, this model has a flaw: it does not take sufficient consideration of the consequences of personal practices when they “intertwine in spatial configurations” (p. 166) while the addition of individual actions can have negative consequences on the environment.

In this context, libertarians provide part of the solution by considering that “taking care of people without engaging their responsibilities is not fair” and that thus “the contribution of each person to policies from which they benefit is fundamental” (p. 96). They leave room for another model of justice, which would not pass exclusively through the distribution of monetary goods, but also through co-production: “Breaking with a charitable tradition, individual freedom and its corollary of responsibility are now insurmountable” (p. 99). This idea will be taken up and developed by the economist Amartya Sen for whom justice must be the subject of deliberations between the actors concerned and be respectful of diversity (of people and places), principles at the foundation of freedom.

The choice of urbanity

For Sen, the city is the ideal space for such a model to emerge. By bringing together a maximum number of individuals in a restricted territory, it would promote social interactions that, if more numerous and more diverse, would be favorable “to productivity, social cohesion and the preservation of natural environments”. A conviction shared by the three authors who explain about it that it allows “exposure to the otherness of things” and that it constitutes in this “the promise of serendipity encounters” (Lévy, 2014). It would offer a “development model, oriented towards change, risk and innovation co-produced by a multitude of actors” (p. 43). But if space is a dimension of all social things (Lévy, 1996b), and its configuration certainly has an impact on the individuals who live there, these considerations can appear, in certain aspects, excessively deterministic. On the one hand, density and diversity are not always correlated, as sociologist Éric Charmes (2007) and political scientist Max Rousseau (2017) have shown, based on very different cases. On the other hand, diversity does not guarantee that populations will mix (social boundaries are sometimes stronger than physical boundaries). Finally, the big city has neither a monopoly on innovation nor on progress, as many researchers such as economist Olivier Bouba-Olga (2017) have pointed out.

The fact remains that the big city offers services that low-density areas are unable to finance. A situation that raises the problem of wealth distribution that Lévy, Fauchille and Povóas raise here. Indeed, in a context where cities are expanding, certain sections of the middle and upper classes benefit from urban services without participating in their financing, by choosing to reside for tax purposes in surrounding peri-urban or rural municipalities. However, to this local injustice is added another, national one, because the French State massively redirects the wealth produced from high-density areas to low-density areas: “In doing so, we favour redistribution per square kilometre rather than per inhabitant” (p. 116). Because, as the economist Laurent Davezies (2009) has shown, poor areas are not always the areas… where the poorest live. A situation that is doubly detrimental: deprived of part of their resources, large cities would no longer have the means to develop, while, on the contrary, placed “under the taps of public money”, low-density areas would not be sufficiently encouraged to develop. The solution would then be to thoroughly rethink our governance model by giving citizens more weight locally and by opting for a federal system in order to “aim for differentiated equality”.

In the end, this book appears as an effective and convincing plea, both scientific and political, in favor of a spatial and co-produced justice, made of new freedoms and responsibilities. This is why the idea that those most concerned, the citizens, must be given a more important place in the public debate seems so relevant.

But defining these responsibilities could be a more difficult exercise than it seems. For example, if many households have made the “choice” of peri-urban areas in recent decades, it is also because they have been encouraged to do so by public authorities (State and local authorities) and private actors (mainly banks and construction companies) (Lambert, 2015). Should they therefore be the only ones today to assume the “withdrawal of the State from the territories” and the consequences of urban sprawl? Formulated in this way, the answer seems far from obvious.