The concept of justice is highly debated and there is more than one definition of justice.173 The Cambridge Dictionary describes justice as “fairness in the way people are dealt with”.174 Likewise, Smith mentions that the “notion of justice invokes equity or fairness, with persons treated as they deserve to be: advantage bestowed by some measure of entitlement and penalty according to the magnitude of the offence”.175
Subsequently, there are three broad types of justice enforcement. Firstly, “retributive justice”, which is concerned with “punishments dealt out to those deemed to have behaved unjustly according to the law”.176
Secondly, “restorative justice”, which focuses on the “compensations given to victims” of injustices.177 And, thirdly, “distributive justice”, which addresses “systemic, group-level, or spatial[ly]” unequal outcomes resulting from the distributions of goods and services.178 Social
172
Field notes (22 February 2018).
173 “Justice,” Oxford Reference (website), accessed 10 July 2018,
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199599868.001.0001/acref-9780199599868-e- 997.
174 “Justice,” Cambridge Dictionary (website), accessed 10 July 2018,
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/justice.; P. Marcuse, “Justice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, ed. R. Crane and R. Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2012), 3.
175 D. M. Smith, “On the (im)possibility of Social Justice in South Africa,” Transformation: Critical Perspectives on
Southern Africa 58 (2005): 45. 176
“Justice,” Oxford Reference (website). 177
Ibid.
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justice is mostly concerned with this last form of justice: “the distributional outcomes from the fairness of the process involved”.179
Beyazit describes social justice as the “just distribution of what is owned, gained and lost by the members of a society”.180
It thus looks at the impact that distributions of goods and services have on people.181
Furthermore, justice depends on “actual human experience” and “the historical legacy of specific forms of discrimination”.182
Accordingly, it is important to contextualize events.183 In the case of Johannesburg, for example, the effects of apartheid’s segregation and certain current developments have led to new forms of unevenness, thus resulting in present-day Johannesburg being seen as a “city of extremes”, with underprivileged areas lacking adequate goods and services.184 The current experiences of people in these areas, resulting from the legacy of discrimination, show the unjust outcomes in these places.
Social scientists have varying ideas on how social and spatial justice come into being and how corresponding injustices should be countered. Marcuse, for instance, argues that economic, social and political processes are the main causes of injustices and can be increased by and are related to spatial injustices.185 Hence there should be “spatial remedies”, but these will not suffice to counter all injustices as the latter are dependent on changing embedded “social, political and economic conditions” within society.186
Marcuse thus argues that processes, such as the capitalist expansion of the city, are social, and their outcomes have a spatial dimension.187
Soja, on the other hand, explicitly argues for the ‘spatiality’ in justice as a critical form of looking at justice.188 He explains that the spatial and the social constantly shape each other
179 Smith, “On the (im)possibility,” 45. 180
E. Beyazit, “Evaluating Social Justice in Transport: Lessons to Be Learned from the Capabilities Approach,”
Transport Reviews 31 no. 1 (2011): 117.
181 “Spatial Justice,” Oxford Reference (website), accessed 10 July 2018,
http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199599868.001.0001/acref-9780199599868-e- 1773.
182 Smith, “On the (im)possibility,” 49. 183
Marcuse, “Justice,” 6; D. Harvey, “Debates and Developments: The Right to the City,” International Journal of Urban and regional research 27, no. 4 (2003): 940.
184 Murray, City of Extremes, xv. 185
K. Iveson, “Social or Spatial Justice? Marcuse and Soja on the Right to the City,” City 15, no. 2 (2011): 252. 186
Iveson, “Social or Spatial Justice,” 252. 187 Ibid, 254.
188
I refer explicitly to Marcuse and Soja in this chapter as they clearly have different views on the ‘spatiality’ of justice. Although they are both Western scholars, both have been referred to in, for example, J. Eliastam, “Interrupting Separateness, Disrupting Comfort: An Autoethnographic Account of Lived Religion, Ubuntu and Spatial Justice,” Theological Studies 72 no. 1 (2016).
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and that the spatial is not a by-product of other injustices.189 He elaborates that “spatial justice is not an alternative to social justice, but a formative aspect of it – that is, social justice or injustice is expressed in specific geographies, while at the same time it is itself shaped by the geographies in which it is embedded”.190
According to Soja, therefore, spatial justice should be seen as a product and a process.191 As Soja explains, “distributional inequality” is “the most basic and obvious expression of spatial injustice … ranging from such vital public services as education, mass transit, police and crime prevention, to more privatized provisioning of adequate food, housing, and employment”.192
Spatial justice thus focuses on the unequal outcomes of the “distribution of resources and rights” between different spaces, and subsequently “seeks a fairer redistribution”.193
Although both social and spatial justice are concerned with the impact on the public in general rather than on the individual, the discussion on what spatial justice exactly concerns, and whether spatial justice is in itself a separate form of justice, continues. Additionally, the relationship and interaction between justice, space and social processes and a final definition of different kinds of justice remain debatable.194
To understand the reasons behind policies and to evaluate their outcomes, it is necessary to see how these are shaped by the striving for a just city.195 The analysis of this thesis will focus on the policies and practices of the BRT within the context of Johannesburg and hence examine the ways in which the City hopes to counter the injustices within the city.