Ethically Informed Urban Planning: Measuring Distributive Spatial Justice for Neighborhood Accessibility

Studies in urban accessibility have advanced our understanding of social and spatial inequalities in the distribution of urban resources in cities worldwide. In response, prominent discourse is shifting to embed justice in urban planning. Ethical principles have historically been employed by philosophers to guide thinking about reshaping society toward more fair and just outcomes. In this work, we present the Mapping Accessibility for Ethically Informed Urban Planning (MAP) framework. MAP operationalizes three metrics of distributive spatial justice based on equality, utilitarianism, and Rawls’s egalitarian principles to compare the implications of choosing different values of justice to evaluate neighborhood accessibility. We apply MAP to three diverse cities located in The Netherlands, Mexico, and South Africa, modeling each city as an urban network model, integrating public transportation, land use, and street networks. Across the cases and ethical perspectives, we find that the implications of defining justice are mediated by a neighborhood’s proximity to local mixed land use for shorter commuting times. For longer commutes, it is dependent on a neighborhood’s access to the central business district of each region, through proximity to transportation infrastructure. The findings underscore the scale, contextual, and value-reliant nature of distributive spatial justice. MAP offers a means to facilitate comparative analysis within urban planning processes, highlighting different ethical concerns for debate by stakeholders and residents.