What is the necessary question to achieve just cities?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18861/ania.2024.14.1.3798Keywords:
Spatial Justice, Accesibility, Right to the City, Selfproduction, Urban Design, Planning, UrbanismAbstract
Spatial justice is understood as the democratization of the city based on the diversification and equitable distribution of resources such as public spaces, schools, and health centers in the territory. This democratization works as a complement to other social and temporal forms of addressing the issue of inequalities. To address spatial justice, the professionals who serve to imagine the territory - architects, urban and landscape designers, urban planners, engineers, among others - embody a technical interest aiming to transform what happens through constructing new infrastructures. Therefore, today, the question of how much infrastructure is needed to reduce inequalities is frequently asked.
This research criticizes the systematic quantification of urban infrastructure as a metric to reduce spatial inequalities. Based on an accessibility study working with spatial analysis tools in the self-produced neighborhood of Petare (Caracas, Venezuela), the author analyzes five scenarios of insertion of public spaces to demonstrate that the strategic location of infrastructure is more relevant than its quantification. In the end, the author opens the question about the importance of questioning why certain urban infrastructures exist and what the city model is so that its distribution in the space comes close to achieving a just city.
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