The Spatial Justice Benchmarking Workshop Guide

This workshop package introduces participants to the Spatial Justice Benchmarking Tool developed by TU Delft for the Horizon Europe UP2030 project. https://up2030-he.eu/ The session invites small groups to engage critically with a set of fictional city visions that illustrate different strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots in climate-transition planning. By evaluating these visions against the nine components of spatial justice, participants learn how justice considerations can be made explicit, debated, and improved in real urban strategies. The exercise is intentionally dialogic. Instead of treating justice as a checklist, the workshop creates conditions for participants to explore contested interpretations of fairness, inclusion, and recognition. Each fictional city captures a particular planning culture, from overly technocratic to heavily participatory, from bureaucratically paralysed to subtly authoritarian, so that groups must read carefully, negotiate meaning, and justify their evaluations. Using the citizen-friendly version of the Benchmarking Tool, groups score their assigned vision, plot results on the Spatial Justice Radar, and reflect on how different emphases shape the city’s transition trajectory. The goal is not to arrive at perfect scores but to reveal how planning narratives encode assumptions about power, access, and representation, and how these assumptions affect policy legitimacy. The workshop closes with a collective discussion comparing the five city profiles, highlighting how justice can be strengthened through better visioning, clearer governance commitments, and more inclusive spatial strategies. This exercise prepares participants to apply the tool to their own municipal contexts and supports the broader UP2030 objective of embedding spatial