The concept of spatial justice and the European Union’s territorial cohesion

ABSTRACT

Regional disparities and inequalities have been a key concern in the EU. This paper develops a concept of spatial justice to examine the European Union policy of territorial cohesion and its reforms. It identifies three key dimensions of spatial justice that distinguish it from social justice: spatiality, which draws attention to spatial aspects of justice; integration of distributive and procedural justice, which goes beyond this controversial dichotomy in social justice; and inclusion, which crosses the boundaries and addresses both inter-regional and intra-regional inequality. This concept of spatial justice is then used to analyse the EU's territorial cohesion approach, a turning point in cohesion policy focusing on spatial imbalances in an enlarged EU. Critical analysis of the seven treaties since 1951 and seven cohesion reports since 1996 shows that this spatial emphasis has been added to, rather than integrated with, social and economic cohesion. It moves from inter-regional redistribution to intra-regional development and from distributive to procedural concerns. Rather than integrating society and space, distributive and procedural justice, and inter-regional and intra-regional cohesion, it moves from one pole to the other. Therefore, its contribution to spatial justice has been limited, providing necessary but insufficient responses to spatial imbalances and social inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Social justice
• regional inequality
• spatial justice
• European Union
• territorial cohesion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 727097, project RELOCAL (Resituating the local in cohesion and territorial development), 2016–2021.