Toward experiential socio-spatial justice: Rethinking redistributive, procedural, and epistemic approaches through Bogotá’s Fenicia Triangle

This paper contends that recognition justice remains underdeveloped within spatial justice theory and planning practice. Our argument is grounded in a review of existing spatial justice theories and an ethnographic analysis of an urban redevelopment plan in Bogotá, Colombia. We distill three principles of socio-spatial justice from the literature. We then review how these established theories of redistributive and procedural justice have been criticized for failing to account for everyday experiences and epistemic injustices, and for being top-down and undemocratic. We assert that socio-spatial justice approaches fall short in addressing the more invisible, situated, and continuously emerging forms of injustice that accompany urban renewal processes intended to be just. In response, we propose two additional principles of ‘experiential justice’ to enhance urban planning theory and practice: to analyze diverse experiences of injustice in situated, real-world, and empirical contexts, and to examine injustice in the often invisible, informal, and nuanced bottom-up experiences of its victims. We demonstrate the relevance of this experiential approach through the ethnographic case study of the Fenicia Triangle, where an innovative land management plan and participatory process diverged from Bogotá’s tradition of expropriation and forced displacement, aiming to exemplify ‘just’ urban planning. Although it addressed distributive and procedural justice, our ethnographic findings reveal that an understanding of ‘experiential justice’ is essential to deepen recognitional justice by transcending technical, financial, and participatory objectives and by acknowledging the significance of home versus house, public versus community spaces, and the experience of waiting.