Spatial Justice and Regional Inequality: An Interdisciplinary Systematic Review

Regions have challenges with the phenomenon of injustice from many aspects, and in different areas suffer from inappropriate distribution of benefits and lack of suitable access to services. Therefore, regional development, especially in developing countries, has always faced many challenges, including inequality and spatial injustice. In order to overcome these challenges, justice-oriented approaches such as territorial justice, environmental justice, and spatial justice have been raised. Therefore, this paper intend to review the scholarly literature of spatial justice on the regional scale to clarify the theoretical ambiguity in this field. The article is based on a systematic review and content analysis strategy. Systematic review is a second-order analysis that seeks to not only synthesizes the results of prior works, but also to reflect upon the processes within those researches. Methods such as open coding were used to collect and analyze the data. As a result, by using both systematic review and content analysis, the subject matter is explicated and organized, and thus the conceptual background that characterizes the development and change of this issue are discussed. The results indicate that the spatial justice had not been well defined. Existing concepts and approaches were contradictory and underdeveloped with respect to incorporation of crucial concepts found in both justice theory and regional theory. To advance this growing field, more conceptual clarity is needed. Also in case, it has been aimed to add relevance and momentum to the literature of spatial justice at regional level by developing a foreground for the future studies.