5.2.4 Justice and public values

Course subject(s) Module 5. Stakeholder Engagement

Another way to look at stakeholder engagement is by taking an ethical perspective. What do we consider as a ‘ just’ city ? What are the key public values (for example, safety, inclusiveness, sustainability) we want to address.

Below we will discuss how to look at justice and an often used (the 4A’s) framework to look at public values AND trade-offs.

Justice 

When we look at the transformation of cities – and sustaining the efforts- the questions is always: who should participate in the stakeholder engagement and how should we look at the outcome.
Justice is a way to look at this. Key factors are:

  • Distributive justice. In other words: dividing the benefits and burdens among groups of people.
    As an  example is water allocation. Water for cities or water for agriculture? Note that unequal distribution of benefits and burdens will be an impairment of social support for transition.
  • Procedural justice Who is able to participates in this process and in which way?

You may have heard of Spatial Justice. This is a rather new term and based on distributive and procedural justice. Spatial justice refers to general access to public goods, basic services, cultural goods, economic opportunity and healthy environments through fair, inclusive and efficient spatial planning, design and management of urban and rural spaces and resources.

Read much more about spatial justice at this site: http://spatialjustice.org

Steps for Analyzing Spatial Inequality from Spatial Justice website

A easy to remember general framework often used (i.e,for infrastructure development) to reflect on public values – and trade-offs!- are the 4 A’s:

• Accessibility (for example, electricity and drinkable water for all)

• Availability (continuity of supply, and quality & reliability of service)

• Acceptability (in terms of social and environmental goals, for example)

• Affordability (people should be able to afford the use of the infra-system).

You could call these ‘feel good’ values. Hardly anyone will be against any of them, individually. However, when looking at the above four kinds of public values, or indeed many more, it’s easy to imagine that taking them all into account will be hard to do, or at least heavily debated. Indeed, often trade-offs need to be made between all these public values. Here co-creation and co-design plays an important role.

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Smart and Sustainable Cities: New Ways of Digitalization & Governance by TU Delft OpenCourseWare is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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