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Description
The paper aims at exploring how models of urban justice, which in the Twentieth century have been essentially based on the equal distribution in space of services and accessibility opportunities, can be imagined and redesigned in an era, in which inhabited spaces tend increasingly to be a complex mix between spaces in the digital and in the physical spheres, hybrid spaces or hybridscapes. Hybridscapes are formed by spaces located simultaneously across such spheres, and by the spatial and social implications they have at both individual and collective level. They concern different areas of urban and daily life, such as work, education, social relations, leisure, etc., and the understanding of themes of urban justice and citizenship has still to be fully explored in such hybrid spheres.
Cities and urban regions have been centre-stage in the debate about inequalities and social justice during the Twentieth century, and they still are today (Fainstein 2010), due to the extreme concentration, polarisation and acceleration they impose to social and economic phenomena. Meanwhile, the type of space(s) people inhabit has been changing with ever-growing speed: this makes such hybridscapes crucial, but very difficult to understand, deconstruct and analyse as complex and multi-layered socio-technical systems, as far as their implications in terms of social interaction, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion and forms of differentiation and inequality are concerned (Kitchin, Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio 2019; McKinnon, Burns, Fast 2023).
The understanding of themes of urban justice and citizenship, as well as the insurgent dimension of struggles for justice (Isin and Ruppert 2015) have still to be fully explored in such spheres. At the same time, while the smart city rhetoric is assuming a prominent position in urban debates, it ultimately concerns only a specific form of socio-technical arrangement, linked to government and control dimensions.
While many of the economic and social mechanisms contributing to the creation and reproduction of social and spatial inequalities are still at play today, even in an exacerbated form, the digitalisation of many spheres of urban life for citizens has implied further lines of fracture and further growing inequalities (McKinnon, Burns and Fast 2023). Thus, if we look at such spheres of contemporary urban life, issues concerning fairness and justice, equal access and the full deployment of citizenship rights can be seen as highly problematic: not only it becomes impossible to deal with already existing inequalities with the spatial tools experimented in the past, but hybridscapes imply completely new forms of differentiation and inequality that have to be newly named, identified, and tackled with a new vocabulary and with novel theoretical, analytical and policy tools.
The main objective of the paper is to reflect upon the possible paths to more just cities in the digital age, and on what concepts of justice, fairness, equality, and citizenship rights may mean in hybrid urban landscapes. To do so, the paper argues that new research aimed to identify new lines of inequality and possible paths to more just and fair urban environments is thus becoming a pressing need.
| Keywords | hybridscapes; urban justice; citizenship |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
