Ethically informed urban planning: measuring distributive spatial justice for neighbourhood accessibility

Abstract Studies in 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. However, the operationalisation of metrics of distributive spatial justice linked to specific ethical principles at the neighbourhood scale are still lacking. In this work, we propose a reproducible framework that measures distributive spatial justice at the neighbourhood scale based on specific ethical principles of Equality, Utilitarianism and Rawls’ Egalitarianism. We evaluate neighbourhood accessibility to opportunities (places of employment) in cities located in the Netherlands, Mexico and South Africa employing urban network models integrating transportation, land use, and street networks created from open-source data. Across the cases and ethical perspectives, we find that justice is mediated by a neighbourhood's proximity to local mixed land use for shorter commuting times. Whereas for longer commutes, justice is dependent on a neighbourhood's access to the Central Business District of each region, through transportation infrastructure. Our findings underscore the scale, contextual and value-reliant nature of distributive spatial justice. This framework offers a means to support ethically informed urban planning and facilitate comparative urban analysis revealing universal and/or context-specific factors contributing to spatial justice.