Envisioning Spatial Justice Explorations, Reflections, Design

Just like the rebels in Star Wars fighting for freedom against oppressive forces, urban planner, architect and political scientist Caroline Newton was drawnto the struggles over space and rights around the world. This fascination grew into an inquiry into the entanglements of spatial organisation and structures of power. Over the years, her work has been driven by a desire to understand – and intervene in – the spatial conditions that shape human lives and social relations. In 2019, the Van Eesteren Fellowship enabled her to deepen her exploration of ways to reimagine urban environments that foster equity, care, and inclusivity, especially in response to today’s environmental and political urgencies.

Envisioning Spatial Justice is both a reflection and a proposition. It synthesises insights accumulated through research and teaching and from years of collaborating with students whose graduation projects placed justice at the core of their spatial investigations. Structured around theory, reflection, and design, the book explores what it means to design with justice in mind. Challenging neoliberal paradigms and drawing on feminist, post-colonial, and radical urban theory, it insists on the political power of imagination. It calls for developing new ethical foundations for spatial practice. Part provocation, part toolkit, part manifesto, Envisioning Spatial Justice speaks to urbanists, designers, educators, and activists committed to co-creating more just and inclusive futures.

About the author: Caroline Newton is an architect, urban planner, and political scientist whose work centres on the intersection of design, spatial justice, and social change. Her career illustrates a commitment to combining scholarly insight with advocacy, illustrating how architecture, planning, and policy can collaboratively address contemporary urban challenges. In her doctoral work, Newton investigated social housing, urban policy, and social capital in Cape Town’s post-apartheid context – an early indication of her lifelong concern with the ways space and power intersect to (re)produce inequalities. Throughout her subsequent roles at universities across Europe, including KU Leuven and University College London’s Development Planning Unit, Newton’s research consistently interrogated entrenched urban inequities and advocated for more inclusive planning practices.