Investigating the Significance of the Relationship between Sense of Justice in Citizens and their Presence in Urban Public Spaces Case Study: Shiraz City

With the development of social and economic injustice in the cities, further attention has been paid to the subject of the spatial justice to create the social equities among various groups of people and this subject has been changed to a comprehensive and expanding phenomenon in today’s cities. In the cities, the urban space is the result of interaction between the space and community and is the place for flourishing the social life. So, it is a structure appropriate for understanding social injustices and evaluating the amount of the citizens' feeling of justice. The urban public spaces are multi-purpose spaces accessible to the public that are distinguishable from the circumscribed and specific domains of the families and individuals and also are regarded as their mediators. In fact, the public space is an essential and fundamental dimension of human community and the social justice is introduced as one of the primary principles of every community in the public space and both justice and injustice are manifested in the space, because justice depends on the time and place and the kind of relationship between the system and social structures. Therefore, there is an ambiguous relationship between the quality of individuals' lives and the access to services; in such a way that the social injustice itself reflects the access of different individuals to various services in any community. Regarding what was said, the present research aims to study the significance of the relationship between the citizens' feeling of justice in Shiraz city and the quality and manner of their attendance in the urban spaces. Accordingly, the main question of the research is: is there any meaningful relationship between the citizens' feeling of justice in Shiraz city and the number and duration of their attendance in the urban spaces? Furthermore, the hypothesis of the present study is expressed as: there is a meaningful relationship between the feeling of justice of citizens in Shiraz city and the number and duration of their attendance in urban public spaces. It is worth mentioning that despite the existence of different studies regarding social justice and urban development and the emphasis on the distributive characteristics of the justice and manner of individuals' access to the civil services, few investigations have been done on the significance of the relationship between the quality of citizens' attendance in urban space (duration and number of citizens' attendance in urban spaces for the purpose of doing the selective and social activities) and the amount of feeling of social justice (the matter which emphasizes the innovation and newness of this research).

The present study is a survey research and Rasinsky and Feldman's social justice questionnaire has been used as the tool for collecting data. The statistical population was all the citizens of Shiraz city presented in urban public spaces and somehow used the urban spaces. With regard to the uncertainty of the number of statistical population and based on Cochran's formula, 170 members of the population were selected as the sample group. Random sampling was applied for collecting the data of the present research. For this purpose, in the selected public spaces of Shiraz (Gaz Square, Daneshjou Square, Enghelab Street and Eram Street) and in specific intervals of different days of the week, all the individuals aged above 15 years were asked to participate voluntarily in this study. The selected urban public spaces have been placed in the central area and middle texture of Shiraz city near to different urban facilities and services and the attendance of different social groups and age groups have been the main reasons of the selection of these urban public spaces. In fact, the selected urban public spaces have qualities that are directly related to the subject of distributive justice and spatial justice. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire of the present research have been confirmed by the use of content validity and Cronbach's Alpha (0.73). With regard to the non-normal distribution of the data, the non-parametric tests of Mann Whitney and Kruskal Wallis and the correlation coefficient of Kramer have been used for data analysis and expressing the amount of correlation of variables, respectively.

The research results reveal that the feeling of social justice has no relationship with the variable ‘duration of attendance in the urban space’. However, the feeling of social justice has a direct relationship with the number of attendance of citizens in the urban spaces (with an intensity of 0.407). Furthermore, the number of attendance of citizens in the urban spaces has a meaningful relationship with their preferences in regard to competency and the manner of obtaining the facilities (with an intensity of 0.223) and the kind of attitude toward the feeling of compassion and sympathy as the most important human values (with an intensity of 0.181). Also, the citizens' preferences in terms of poverty of individuals for the reason of not having a motivation and goal in life has a relationship with the duration of citizens' attendance in urban spaces (with an intensity of 0.168). In this case, it seems that the situation for the development of feeling of social justice among the citizens can be provided by taking measures necessary to improve the condition and manner of the citizens’ attendance in the urban spaces. In this regard, some of the most important effective strategies are:Need: designing collective spaces for social interactions and collective conversation among citizens; designing appropriate urban furniture in collective spaces for the improvement of social interactions; designing space by regarding all the public facilities necessary for them such as drinking fountain, public lavatory and so on. Equity: considering 24 hours’ land uses for perpetuating citizen's attendance and further monetizing of businesses; paying attention to human scale in the design of urban spaces; establishment of gratuitous entertainments for the purpose of attendance of individuals with little financial affordance and use of them.Equality: designing urban spaces in crowded paths and places with heavy traffic; designing appropriate urban furniture usable for all the individuals; creating versatile uses in the space for the purpose of improvement of variety and diversity.

 designing spaces for social interactions and an opportunity for revealing the individual capacities and inherent talents of citizens, increasing supervisors for better improvement of individuals' safety and security for further attendance of citizens; holding the meetings in the space.