Does spatial research achieve true justice? From a systematic literature review of studies on urban space and residents’ perceptions

Human perception serves as the primary pathway through which residents establish connections with urban spaces, profoundly influencing residents’ attitudes and behaviors, and subsequently impacting urban development. Justice constitutes both the ideal state for all social relations, including perception and the value orientation guiding spatial formation. Understanding how justice perspectives are embedded in research on urban spaces and resident perceptions is critical for shaping justice-oriented urban spaces. Current academic boundaries between the concepts of justice and equality remain ambiguous, and research pathways integrating urban space and resident perception studies with justice perspectives remain undefined. This review aims to construct a theoretical framework for examining the relationship between urban space and resident perception, and to explore pathways for achieving justice in research. This paper conducted searches across three databases—Web of Science Core Collection, Elsevier, and Scopus—and identified 393 studies published between 2019 and 2024 following the PRISMA guidelines and explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria. Study quality was assessed using the JBI tool, and narrative synthesis methods were employed to code and integrate research content, trajectory, and justice perspective. Findings indicate that: (a) Technological advancements in artificial intelligence drive the transformation of space in research from a carrier of perception to an element. (b) Current implementations of justice exhibit a disconnection between conceptual articulation and research paradigms. This paper posits that future research could progressively refine mechanisms and practical applications for achieving spatial justice through resident perception by leveraging artificial intelligence advancements, ultimately establishing quantitative material-space research frameworks guided by spatial justice principles, while acknowledging potential biases in the geographical distribution of evidence.