Abstract
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.
Keywords
Introduction
In an increasingly unequal world, the meaning of justice remains one of the most pressing topics of urban scholarship and practice. In cities where inequality is rampant and space is limited, justice is regarded as a central component of any urban renewal project. Geographic and planning literature offers social and spatial justice theories that aim for equality in democratic participation and diversity, the redistribution of economic resources, and capabilities to reduce structural inequalities (Fainstein, 2010; Israel and Frenkel, 2018; Marcuse, 2009). In philosophical debates about justice, the material focus on redistribution was criticized as scholars called for a balance between redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). Building on this debate, we argue that recognition is underdeveloped in redistributive and procedural spatial justice theory and practice in urban planning.
Our arguments contribute to recent justice literature where scholars (e.g. Balibar et al., 2012; Barnett, 2018; Fricker, 2007; Fürst, 2023; Lake, 2018; Mott, 2018; Otsuki, 2021) call for an approach that recognizes everyday experiences of injustice, immaterial forms of suffering, and justice as a continuous learning process rather than static outcomes. We base our contribution on an ethnographic case study in Bogotá, Colombia, where a university sought to change the traditional approach to urban renewal, breaking with expropriation and forced displacement. The project addressed the requirements of ‘just’ urban planning through innovative participatory processes, land-use and ownership innovations, and social support mechanisms. However, our ethnographic data reveal dimensions of justice the project and theory overlook because meanings of injustice are experiential, less visible, and developed throughout the process.
We first provide an overview of established social and spatial justice literature, leading to three basic principles for socio-spatial justice: (1) spatial and social justice are dialectically related; (2) spatial arrangements are only just if they offer equal distribution of capabilities and opportunities that acknowledge difference and provide alternatives to unequal developments; (3) there is a direct relationship between democratic processes and just outcomes, often captured in participatory planning practices. Then, we juxtapose these with critiques in recent critical literature and epistemic approaches to injustice. Based on these insights, we propose two additional principles that form our approach to ‘experiential justice’: (4) studying ‘experiential justice’ is to arrive at justice through intersubjective engagement about plural experiences of injustice in situated, real-world, and empirical experiences; (5) there is a need to study injustice in the often invisible, informal, and nuanced bottom-up experiences of its victims. After a methodological discussion, we use our approach to analyze the Fenicia Triangle planning project in Bogotá. Our analysis brings three dimensions of experiential justice to the fore that can inform just city practice and theory: the meaning of home versus house, community versus public spaces, and the prevailing experience of waiting.
Rethinking the theory of justice
Much of the scholarly debate about justice can be traced back to the philosophical discussion about redistribution or recognition. The redistribution approach mainly aims for the equal distribution of democratic participation, diversity, economic resources, infrastructure, and social rights. Laying its foundations, Rawls (1999) proposed that justice concerns the equal redistribution of ‘primary goods’ to allow for freedom of movement and opportunity. He conceives justice in abstract and universal terms, separated from existing political contexts, but simultaneously accepts much of the capitalist economic structure that shapes deeply unequal societies.
The notion of recognition stems from a poststructuralist critique of the liberal approach to justice. It builds on Young’s (1990) account of justice and difference, to whom injustice ‘should be primarily defined in terms of oppression and domination, rather than distributional’. She argues that recognition relies on a positive sense of group difference in which the group defines itself rather than being defined from the outside (Young, 1990: 172). Therefore, Young’s account is not merely a distributive issue, but a lived restriction that produces structural and material constraints.
In a foundational debate, Fraser and Honneth (2003) sought to integrate recognition into redistribution. They view recognition as a key struggle of our times, and both argue that in struggles for justice, recognition should bear economic meaning – in terms of redistributing resources and power – and cultural meaning – in terms of equal recognition for individual or group identity. They differ in their understanding of recognition. Honneth sees recognition as an overarching moral category in which redistribution is a sub-variety (Fraser and Honneth, 2003: 3). Fraser (2000) sees the two categories as equally fundamental dimensions of justice. She denies that redistribution can be subverted under recognition and argues that justice requires demanding equitable resources and wealth as well as recognition of identity and plurality. She proposes to rethink the relationship between redistribution and recognition to ‘conceptualize recognition so that they can be integrated with struggles of redistribution’ (Fraser, 2000: 109).
In this article, we use Young and Fraser’s philosophical insights to reflect on how spatial theory has built on redistribution and recognition, what urban theory overlooks, and how analyzing ‘experiential justice’ could contribute to conceptualize and practice recognitional justice in urban transformation.
Redistributive and procedural justice
In geography and planning, scholars have built on debates about social justice to develop a spatial understanding (Dikeç, 2001; Fainstein, 2010; Marcuse et al., 2009; Pirie, 1983; Soja, 2013). The notion of spatial justice asserts that space shapes injustice as social processes create unjust geographies and vice versa (Soja, 2013: 5). Social and spatial justice are dialectically related; studying or intervening in one affects the other. For urban planning, this dialectic makes space a site of politics for fighting injustices (Dikeç, 2001) and claiming a group’s Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1967). Based on these spatial interpretations, urban planning and geography scholarship developed in two directions that do not necessarily juxtapose, but had a focus on redistribution or recognition: some focus on redistributive mechanisms and capabilities (Israel and Frenkel, 2018; Marcuse, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011; Przybylinski and Sidortsov, 2023; Nussbaum and Sen, 1993) and others on existing and potential institutions and programs for just procedures (Fainstein, 2010; Lake, 2016; Moroni, 2020; Stokes-Ramos, 2023).
The redistributive response focuses on mitigating involuntary confinement of groups to limited space and unequal resource allocation (Marcuse, 2009: 94). Marcuse notes that spatial injustices cannot be fixed through spatial remedies alone, as they stem from histories of social, political, and economic relations (Marcuse, 2009: 97). One way in which scholars have dealt with this is the capabilities approach. This influential framework for addressing redistributive justice is widely applied to urban development practices (Robeyns, 2006). Developed by Nussbaum and Sen (1993) and Nussbaum (2000), it serves as an evaluative framework assessing how people can realize opportunities for a dignified life. ‘Capabilities are the “real” or substantive freedoms people have to achieve certain functions’ (Przybylinski and Sidortsov, 2023: 124). Nussbaum (2011) expanded this approach by establishing minimum requirements for dignity while ‘taking each individual as an end, and asking not just about the total or average well-being but the opportunities available to each person’ (p. 18). While these arguments recognize difference and plural experiences, they follow a top-down redistributive model addressing socio-economic injustice. Planning scholars continue to develop redistributive approaches for urban development projects. Israel and Frankel (2018) argue that capital resources in living environments determine life chances, influencing spatial equality of opportunity and spatial justice. Although recognizing that redistributive and procedural approaches are interlinked, they assess justice primarily through outcomes.
The call for recognitional justice has been articulated in spatial justice theory with a focus on procedures. Justice here means equity in the power to influence decision-making processes (Stokes-Ramos, 2023: 1974). Fainstein’s (2010) approach on diversity and equity has been foundational to the procedural debate, focusing on the relationship between democratic processes and just outcomes. She was criticized for situating justice primarily as an object of planning, a criterion for evaluation anterior to the process rather than an innate subject (Lake, 2016: 1207). Lake argues that the quest for justice should be understood as a substantive factor in the planning process. Rather than ‘a subject of planning, justice should be the subject for planning’ (Lake, 2016: 1219).
Like the redistributive approach, the procedural approach remains prevalent among urban planning scholars. Moroni contributed three key insights: First, justice theory should be explicit about institutions’ role because ‘what we are assuming to be unjust in reality, are the urban institutions that have allowed such a situation to arise and do not intervene in order to right them’ (Moroni, 2020: 254). Second, not all benefits can be distributed (Moroni, 2020: 257). Third, concepts of justice pose the problem, but conceptions of justice possible solutions (Moroni, 2020: 259). Building on this, Weghorst et al. (2025) propose a framework to make decision-making procedures about allocative justice transparent (p. 18). Uitermark and Nicholls (2017) warn planners about making substantive claims on justice or risking accommodation of inequalities through community engagement.
Drawing on how planning and geography literature has expanded established understandings of justice, we can formulate three principles to assess spatial justice and propose specific empirical sites where these forms of (in)justice are studied (see Table 1). First, spatial and social justice are dialectically related; intervening in one affects the other and vice versa. Second, spatial arrangements are just only if they offer equal distribution of capabilities and opportunities that acknowledge difference (class, race, ethnicity, gender) and provide alternatives to unequal developments. These scholars examine how policies can redistribute wealth and build capacity for dignified life. Third, there is a direct relationship between democratic processes and just outcomes, often captured in participatory planning practices.
Overview of justice principles in the ongoing socio-spatial justice literature.
Although recognition is embedded in some of these principles, what it means to be recognized throughout a just urban planning process remains underdeveloped in this scholarship. Two recent critiques contributed to our argument and provide the basis for our additional approach to experiential justice.
Two recent critiques on classic theories of justice
Recent literature has criticized the disconnection between distributive and procedural approaches to spatial justice theory discussed above. This critique originates in Harvey’s sequential reflections on justice, in which he moves from a predominantly redistributive model (Harvey, 1973) to a model that includes Young’s notion of difference (Harvey, 1996). Inspired by pluralist theory and Fraser’s (2009) notion of opening up our understanding of justice to novel forms of ‘justice-to-come’, critical scholars (Balibar et al., 2012; Barnett, 2017, 2018; Fricker, 2007; Fürst, 2023; Hoover, 2023; Lake, 2018; Mott, 2018; Otsuki, 2021; Przybylinski, 2022; Walker, 2009) argued that theories on spatial justice, urban restructuring, and planning practice should move away from ideal types of justice to prioritize empirical and real world experiences of injustice, and develop procedures that are grounded in epistemic justice.
The first critique on theories of justice is that they fail to include the plurality of day-to-day experiences of injustice that go beyond the redistribution of power, resources, and wealth (Balibar et al., 2012). Critical scholars call for an open and receptive understanding of justice that includes diversity and plurality rather than assuming that ‘certain conventions of justice will always be present or dominant’ (Walker, 2009: 629). These authors suggest a shift ‘beyond distributive and ideal theories of justice toward those explicating injustices coming more from bottom-up approaches’ (Przybylinski, 2022: 1). A focus on the process of procedural justice tends to ignore the micropolitics of the experience and overlook that there are ingrained hierarchies that shape the process and the relations (Lake, 2018; Mott, 2018; Verloo, 2023).
This argument is developed in Barnett’s (2017, 2018) ‘Priority of injustice’. He argued that spatial theory should shift away from the idea that justice’s currency is a divisible set of primary goods, resources, rights, or capabilities. Instead, he argues for prioritizing injustice and how it is experienced through individual claims, institutional arrangements, and structural inequalities (Barnett, 2017). Barnett emphasizes the lived experience of injustice as a primary object for spatial theory. ‘Justice is not an ideal at all. It is a condition that is approached through processes of repair, recognition, redress, reparation, and redistribution’ (Barnett, 2018: 323). Hoover (2023) applied this focus on lived experiences to gentrification by understanding its harms from those experiencing them. He argues that ‘we gain greater critical purchase on contemporary urban life, as we are forced to look beyond isolated violations of pregiven principles of justice to the wider experience of injustice itself’ (Hoover, 2023: 932).
These critiques lead to understanding (in)justice in empirical situations rooted in experience instead of conceiving justice as an ideal theory. The analytical task of justification must be informed by empirical descriptions of ‘real world’ events (Jaggar, 2009: 12). A redistributive and procedural response to injustice risks overlooking the deeply historic and structural nature that decolonial (Jaggar, 2009) lenses contributed to the justice debate. Justice is deeply historical and structural, in both macro-political-economic and micro-interactional terms.
A second critique is that procedural justice is ‘pre-democratic’ because those subjected to this order are not featured as its authors (Forst, 2014: 4). Justice is not established by formal principles but rather a ‘permanent invention’ (Balibar et al., 2012) requiring continuous context-specific reflection. The linear assumption that procedural justice leads to distributive justice ‘undermines the open process of pursuing justice by a collective that continually reflects on and negotiates for the quality of life that one deserves’ (Otsuki, 2021: 4). Justice should be seen as a subject of planning rather than its object, returning its definition and achievement to a central place within planning practice (Lake, 2016). What is considered just changes based on time, place, and local experiences. Within a similar vein, Barnett evokes Fraser’s work to argue that prioritizing injustice involves thinking about how social relations, institutional arrangements, and norms systematically disadvantage some persons as participants in shared practices of public life (Fraser in Barnett, 2018: 323).
These warnings bring us to the notion of epistemic injustice, which refers to situations where someone is misrecognized for their knowledge, credibility, and interpretive capacity (Fricker, 2007). The notion critiques classic procedural justice theory by problematizing ‘whose knowledge counts’ in participatory processes. It shows how groups may be included in a ‘just process’, yet epistemic injustice undermines their dignity as ‘knowers’. Fricker identifies two types: testimonial injustice, when prejudice leads listeners to discount speaker credibility, and hermeneutical injustice, when gaps in collective interpretive resources prevent people from making sense of their experiences (Fricker, 2007: 155). Hermeneutical injustice creates a conceptual gap between victims’ experiences and their ability to interpret and communicate them publicly (Fürst, 2023).
This concept helps explain why citizens’ knowledge in participatory urban development rarely appears in final plans. To apply it empirically, we must operationalize it to identify subtle forms of power excluding citizens from participation. However, understanding socio-spatial justice in urban development extends beyond epistemic injustice. Based on the two critiques discussed above, we argue that prioritizing experiences of injustice requires pushing socio-spatial justice toward a more experiential approach.
Toward experiential justice
Drawing on the two critiques in the literature discussed above, we propose two additional principles to understand justice in urban development, thereby enabling a better conceptualization of recognitional justice, which we call ‘experiential justice’. These are not meant to replace the insights from earlier theories on distributive and procedural approaches to justice, but to contribute to these understandings through active engagement with the everyday experiences of injustice (Barnett, 2017, 2018). By adding a fourth and a fifth principle to the analysis and practice of justice, the approach offers alternative understandings of what redistributive and procedural interventions mean to people in a given situation. This is important because, as we will see below, these experiences of injustice are often less visible because they occur in between formal procedures or are immaterial effects of well-intended processes.
The first principle of studying ‘experiential justice’ is to analyze and theorize plural experiences of injustice in situated, real-world, and empirical experiences (Balibar et al., 2012; Barnett, 2017; Ghorashi and Rast, 2024; Hoover, 2023; Przybylinski, 2022; Walker, 2009). This is based on Young’s (1998) claim that ‘to invoke the language of justice and injustice, is to make a claim’ (p. 40). Rather than an ideal theory, evaluating claims of injustice requires an examination of the situated contexts in which grievances and harms are generated, recognized, problematized, and acted upon (Barnett, 2011; Young, 2006). Experiential justice, therefore, means to arrive at what the meaning of injustice is via an intersubjective and empirical engagement with the local communities for whom just urban transformations are proposed.
The second principle is based on Barnett’s call to ‘resist the temptation to dominantly pay attention to social movements and other expressed claims of harm and injury. Because this can lead us to pass over how the dampening of victims’ capacities to express their own experiences of harm and injury and exploitation is often a central feature of unjustifiable power relations’ (Barnett, 2018: 319). Our second principle is thus to study injustice also in ‘experiences’ that are often invisible, informal, and bottom-up, and outside the formal procedures.
This principle elaborates on Fricker’s (2007) concept of hermeneutical injustice: ‘The injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization’ (Fricker, 2007: 158). Hermeneutical injustice was central to our ethnographic data, revealing how some aspects of justice were addressed in the Bogotá urban development project, while other aspects of communities’ socio-spatial experiences remained overlooked. Fricker does not provide a solution to the conceptual lacuna of hermeneutical injustice. Our approach to focus on ‘experience’ draws on Fürst (2023).
Fürst bridges hermeneutical injustice and recognition by introducing a phenomenal concept centered on ‘experience’. Phenomenal concepts refer to experiences ‘in terms of what these experiences are like’ (Fürst, 2023: 232). This experience can be understood in physical and subjective terms when undergone attentively. Fürst proposes closing the gap between hermeneutical injustice and recognition in three steps: acknowledging the ‘pure phenomenal concept’ that directly picks out the target experience; moving from this to a ‘community-relational experience’ tied to the situatedness of a marginalized group (Fürst, 2023: 235); and finding a ‘public concept’ that expresses the target phenomenon to solve the hermeneutical gap. The experiences of ‘home’, ‘community places’, and ‘waiting’, elaborated in this paper, developed similarly and reveal injustice overlooked by redistributive, procedural, and epistemic approaches.
This phenomenological approach, which Fürst builds on Husserl and Moran (2012), extends beyond Fricker’s work, positioning ‘experience’ as essential to addressing epistemic injustice and recognizing diverse voices in urban development. ‘Experiential’ refers to individual and group experiences of community members and their enacted behaviors (Fürst, 2023: 240). Through phenomenological experience, meaning and action are constructed ‘within the current of life activities’ (Ingold, 2021: 154). Validating marginalized peoples’ experiential injustice provides an essential layer previous justice understandings overlook (Table 2).
Principles of analyzing experiential socio-spatial justice in urban development.
These additional principles build on insights from redistributive and procedural approaches, differing in three ways. First, by analyzing how planning institutions make substantive justice claims and comparing these to local communities’ experiences, we address the pitfall identified by Uitermark and Nicholls (2017: 46). Studying experiential justice emphasizes that justice knowledge is situated, as harm claims emerge from somewhere (Jaggar, 2009). Second, in urban development, learning about (in)justice is not linear but circular, continuing beyond project completion (Otsuki, 2021). Third, this perspective integrates the two poles of urban planning literature by emphasizing socio-spatial justice in both procedural terms – fair interactions – and substantive terms – good consequences (Barnett, 2018: 323). Drawing on established justice principles and adding our experiential approach allows scholars and planners to broaden their justice conception and deepen recognition in spatial justice theory. It enables recognition of plural and changing experiences of (in)justice throughout planning (Fraser, 2000, 2009; Young, 1998). We will analyze how a Bogotá urban development project aligns with redistributive and procedural justice principles, exploring our ‘experiential approach’ through an ethnographic analysis.
Methodologies
The results presented combine 30 in-depth interviews with residents and planning professionals during and after the planning process, and 3 years of participant observations in project-related meetings. We conducted extensive document analysis of planning, regulatory, and legal documents. Our ethnographic research design enabled us to understand the experiences of people subject to urban renewal (Verloo, 2020), while engaging in project management. This was possible through knowledge co-creation (Ghorashi and Rast, 2024) between a scholar (Nanke Verloo), a local student working in the community (Malena Rinaudo-Velandia), and a professional working for the project (Johnny Tascón). Each author’s positionality provided access to different field dimensions. The first author studied the urban planning project comparing citizen participation in the Global North and South. Between March and August 2023, she conducted observations, document analyses, and 23 interviews with professionals from the planning department, developer company, development organizations, citizens, and University stakeholders. The second author conducted 3 years of ethnographic research in the neighborhood for her master’s thesis (Rinaudo-Velandia, 2023). The third author has been an external consultant for the urban planning project since 2015, responsible for neighborhood activities and resident-university communication. This collaboration was an attempt at what Álvarez-Rivadulla (2026) calls critical engagement: spanning theory and practice, learning from the South. Our positionality required critical reflection on each other’s knowledge; this process enhanced our critical thinking. Working together provided us data spanning almost 10 years.
We took an inductive approach to theorize the empirical concepts that were mobilized by the stakeholders in the case study. Our approach is based on how Fürst (2023) operationalized hermeneutical injustice, thus mobilizing the conceptual resources that victims of hermeneutical injustice possess through experiential concepts that initially were individual experiences. In the later stages of our fieldwork (in 2023), after the urban development plan was finalized and the participatory process was complete, we noticed that three topics recurred as pure phenomenal concepts (Fürst, 2023) in interviews and conversations with residents: home, community space, and waiting.
We began iterating between individual interviews, our observations, and existing theory on the geographies of ‘doing home’ (Caldeira, 2017; Jacobs and Smith, 2008; McFarlane, 2011; Muñoz, 2018), space and place (Lofland, 1998; Low and Smith, 2013), and temporalities of urban developments (Auyero, 2011; Harms, 2013; Koster, 2020). These three topics occurred more frequently than others in most individual interviews. To verify the consistency of these issues across residents’ ‘community-relational experiences’ as we conducted follow-up in-depth interviews in 2024. With this paper, we seek to turn these hermeneutical experiences into publicly graspable concepts of injustice (Fürst, 2023). Our inductive and empirical approach to home, community space, and waiting does not do justice to the extensive debates. Since our paper focuses on justice and these concepts emerge from our inductive analyses of ‘experiential justice’, providing an exhaustive literature overview of each concept would exceed this article’s scope. We engaged with the literature to move from hermeneutical injustice to publicly recognized concepts. In the ethnographic discussion, we explore the iterative process between empirical findings and theory.
Redistributive and procedural justice in Bogotá: Ensuring the ability to stay
The Fenicia Triangle is an urban renewal project in Las Aguas, downtown Bogotá. Due to its central location, the project is strategic and symbolic for Bogotá. To understand its significance from a spatial justice perspective, we must contextualize it in Bogotá’s urban renewal model, adopted in the Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (land use plan) of 2000. The Fenicia Triangle was among the zones designated for renewal. The model relies on private developers formulating renewal plans and a public entity promoting urban renewal, with the municipality verifying compliance through land management 1 mechanisms.
The development of Fenicia contrasts with neighboring Manzana 5 (city block 5, see Figure 1), developed between 2008 and 2016. Manzana 5’s impact on the Fenicia Triangle community was profound, with land pooling through expropriation causing fear among displaced families. Community leaders often say, ‘First, they took Manzana 5, and now they are coming for the rest of the neighborhood’ (Pinilla and Arteaga, 2021: 35). These memories created challenges for initiating the Fenicia Triangle development.
Map of the Fenicia Triangle.
Los Andes University started the project in 2007 with real estate objectives, but professors challenged this approach, proposing a participatory process for community justice; ‘We wanted to show that we are all members of the same community: students, professors, and local neighbors’ (Personal communication, 11 May 2023). In 2010, they began efforts to understand and engage the local community.
Interventions to promote procedural justice
Between 2012 and 2013, an in-depth participation process took place, consisting of 10 scenario-building and dialogue workshops in sessions of up to 35 participants from the local community (Uniandes, 2014: 20). This process led to a planning proposal that was supposedly in line with residents’ needs. But when the plan came out, it became fiercely protested by a community-led activist organization called ‘No se Tomen Las Aguas’ (Don’t take over Las Aguas). They developed strategies that combined street protests (in October and November 2013 and in March 2014) and effective media communication. The project became highly contested and well covered in media and research. The fieldwork for an earlier paper on the same case by Muñoz and Fleischer (2022) was done during this protest period between 2013 and 2014.
Instead of excluding the protest group and continuing the plans from the first participatory process, the university and its professors decided to function as equity planners advocating for the marginalized community (Sotomayor and Daniere, 2018). They called to rethink the plan and listen to the activists: [No se tomen Las Aguas] is the best thing that could have happened to the project. For one, the fact that nothing is built yet may be one of their most successful outcomes. But secondly, it provided the university with an organized group to talk to. (Personal communication, university professor, 11 May 2023)
After 2014, the participatory process engaged the activist group to make adjustment to the ongoing plans. In participation practice, moments of protest are often excluded from the formal procedure (Verloo and Galeano Salgado, 2025). That the participation process demonstrated continuous engagement with the local community, even when new groups emerged and contested the plans, speaks to the principle of procedural justice (Fainstein, 2010).
The involvement of the protest group marked the second period of participation between May 2013 and September 2014, which included scenario-building workshops. These workshops were divided into 4 sessions, which included 2 workshops on housing, home, and retail (48 and 44 participants), a workshop on public space and urbanism (participant data not available), and a workshop on childhood and youth (22 participants; Uniandes, 2017: 31).
Although ‘No se tomen las aguas’ was a small fraction of the residents, the group was an important addition to the ongoing and well-visited participatory process that included other residents, as detailed by Pinilla and Arteaga (2021). ‘No se tomen las aguas’ represented those most directly exposed to the risks that the original project posed. Their representativeness stemmed from the alliances they forged with previously underrepresented people in the community: they spoke for the elderly, renters, and local businesses, and built a coalition with university faculty and students to acquire the technical tools needed to negotiate substantively. They not only participated in the formal participatory process. Our second author observed them organizing informal and independent gatherings with residents and the community, allowing them to convey their messages and concerns during the negotiations and participatory process. Then they did direct negotiations with the district to turn demands into binding agreements within the decree. This makes their involvement, although not statistically representative, more representative and increases the ability to carry the voices of those most affected into the participation, and ultimately influence the policy framework in advance of citizen needs.
This process defined the terms of the partial plan for Fenicia (420-2014 Decree, Mayor of Bogotá, 2014a) and the residents’ protection plan (448-2014 Decree, Mayor of Bogotá, 2014b), which established the conditions that urban renewal projects must meet for the protection of the rights of traditional residents, business owners, and landowners in urban renewal areas, not only in Fenicia, but also in the rest of Bogotá. This decree introduced a new act for residents’ protection and became one of the key elements structuring the new urban development policy approved for Bogotá over the next 16 years.
The continuous engagement and alterations to the project led to a direct relationship between the community’s needs, the topics discussed in the participatory process, and the results of the plan and the Decrees. Since 2016, 93% of the old residents owning property or land have voluntarily signed up for the project. The total private land in the area amounts to 55,480 m2. According to confidential records of Progresa Fenicia, which can be requested with the third author, the area where residents accepted the Decree is 51,467 m2 (42,964 m2 of properties agreed to the project via letters of intention and 9503 m2 with signed contribution agreements).
We will now shortly list how the project set the conditions for the redistributive principles of just urban planning with this land trust innovation: a combination of spatial and social interventions that sought to develop equal distribution of capabilities and opportunities.
Interventions to promote redistributive justice via land management
In Bogotá, urban renewal has forced lower-income residents to relocate to city outskirts due to high land costs and inefficient speculation control, disrupting social networks and reducing access to services and employment (Janoschka, 2016). The Fenicia project counters this by implementing a one-to-one square meter exchange model between existing and new buildings, rather than offering insufficient land value compensation. Current property owners in the project area will receive new housing units matching their existing homes’ square footage. This square-meter exchange principle forms the backbone of the 2014 Decree, protecting residents’ right to remain while allowing developers to pool land without prior purchase. 2 The exchange benefits both parties: traditional residents gain from the value difference between old and new properties, while developers avoid complex land acquisition processes. The land management includes temporary housing and compensation for lost rental income.
The second spatial justice intervention expands public spaces. The Fenicia neighborhood’s public space planning was established through participatory workshops in 2012, led by Architecture Faculty professors. The project will increase public space from 3.3 hectares (37.5%) to 5.2 hectares (59%), adding parks, squares, roads, wider sidewalks, and green areas (Uniandes, 2014: 38). This enhanced public space will accommodate diverse functions, including active and passive recreation, reforestation, tourism, heritage preservation, and urban gardening.
Capabilities, equitable social interventions, and opportunities
The Fenicia project anticipates social injustices from spatial interventions impacting people in poverty. The project includes social programs and financial compensations to address inequalities (Nussbaum, 2011; Przybylinski and Sidortsov, 2023) by building capabilities to remain in the area (Pinilla and Arteaga, 2021). Social programs offered to the community include productivity and employability training to enhance employment opportunities; entrepreneurship support for local business; activities for senior citizens; and afterschool programs providing workshops and academic reinforcement (Mayor of Bogotá, 2014a: article 69). These activities occur at project offices or Universidad de Los Andes’ campus (see Figure 1).
To compensate low-income households, residents’ strata (estrato) would freeze for ten years after moving. ‘Strata’ classifies households from 1 (most vulnerable) to 6 (most affluent) socio-economic groups through an assessment of the physical characteristics of their dwellings, their immediate surroundings, and the urban or rural planning context in which they are located (Departamento Administrativo de Planeación Distrital, 2004). In this framework, higher strata subsidize lower strata through solidarity principles. With the urban renewal, the strata was expected to go up and make service costs unaffordable. The freeze ensures stable and affordable living costs and public service charges post-development (Pinilla, 2018).
Furthermore, temporary compensation is provided for families who lose income from their contributed plots, ensuring that families maintain their livelihoods during the transition. Trust funds help people pay off property-related debts, allowing families to borrow money from the Fenicia Trust for delayed taxes and utilities debt.
To support residents’ business development, the project will build commercial spaces for collective rental to offset new costs associated with horizontal property administration. Furthermore, the project includes measures to support vulnerable populations without land, acknowledging their historical marginalization. These measures emerged from dialogue roundtables of 2013 and 2014 (Decree 448, 2014, article 11).
Legal support programs assist residents with land titling costs, thereby ensuring secure property rights (Pinilla, 2018). This support in document preparation and legal advice helps residents navigate complex land titling processes affordably.
Low-income tenants and slum dwellers’ right to remain was included in the Fenicia Partial Plan Technical Support Document – TSD (Uniandes, 2014). In the literature, slum dwellers are regarded as part of a ‘produced’ informality, living in ‘gray spaces’ that are neither strictly legal nor illegal but are often denied official recognition and basic services (Banerjee, 2023; Roy, 2005). In the project, the difference between slum dwellers and tenants also refers to the type of housing they inhabit. Slum dwellers live in highly temporary and informal shelters while tenants officially rent spaces in concrete buildings. Low-income tenants have priority access to public housing units via subsidies, while slum-dwelling families will access units through subsidies and project compensation (Uniandes, 2014: 126).
It should be noted that a small group of residents continued to protest the developments. In an interview, the group’s leader expressed concern about residents who cannot access legal services and land titles or obtain priority access to social housing and other project services, because they do not own land or lack a rental contract that proves their residency (personal communication, 11 August 2023). Although the project seeks to include these residents with unstable living conditions, some of these tragic stories remain unresolved.
In sum, spatial and social interventions result from participatory processes where residents share needed compensations to remain in the area. The project enhances redistributive and procedural justice in land management by mitigating negative economic impacts of involuntary resettlement that lower socio-economic families typically face in Bogotá’s urban renewal. The participatory process led 93% of landowners, of whom the majority auto-constructed their homes, to join the land trust voluntarily since 2016.
Experiential injustice in Bogotá: From the ability to stay to the desire to remain
Although the discussion shows that resident participation formulated the basis for agreements and principles of the urban development plan, our ethnographic findings reveal dimensions of injustice that surpass initial limitations of redistributive and procedural models. As the project advanced through implementation phases, residents began to worry about factors related to housing’s emotional, social, and physical attributes. Initially, people focused on mobilizing strategies to secure their ability to stay in the neighborhood. Later, the question became whether the project’s physical and temporal conditions would generate a desire to remain. Based on the two additional principles to recognize ‘experiential justice’ proposed earlier, we identified three forms of experiential injustice overlooked in Fenicia: the meaning of home versus house, the practice of public versus community spaces, and the experience of promise versus waiting.
Home versus house
Our ethnographic data adds experiential injustice that complicates the desire to remain in the neighborhood. These findings align with earlier studies; Muñoz and Fleischer (2022) show that residents’ narratives reveal memories that claim space by knowing who lives where, which buildings were there before, and through anecdotes of local characters (p. 52). The willingness to stay depends on whether new places trigger such positive memories. Hurtado-Tarazona and Rinaudo-Velandia (2022) find that residential satisfaction in Fenicia often relates to intangible values like emotional ties and memories that homes harbor. Our data adds that beyond memories, the everyday experience of home versus house is crucial.
The geography literature shows home as a political site of ‘doing critical geography’ through everyday practices (Brickell, 2012: 235), focusing on practices and experiences that perform ‘home’ as an ‘assemblage of dwelling’ (Jacobs and Smith, 2008; McFarlane, 2011). Our ethnographic data shows how Fenicia’s traditional residents ‘do home’ in their auto-constructed neighborhood. The neighborhood’s multi-story houses are largely auto-constructed by families who built them from scratch. These homes grow with family developments, involving ‘spaces that are never quite done, always being altered, expanded, and elaborated upon’ (Caldeira, 2017: 5). As families expand, additional floors accommodate new generations. The result is family-built homes where extended families of up to 15 people live together. These homes generate everyday habits where children play while family members prepare meals together. Homes thus extend beyond physical structures to embody personal spaces aligned with their lifestyles.
A second feature of ‘doing home’ is illustrated through ‘Don Beto’, whose house represents more than a dwelling space. His house, where he raised his daughter and cares for his grandchildren, has become his workspace for breeding fighting cocks. His home blends urban and rural elements, showing the relationship between living spaces and livelihood. The home features fighting cocks and grazing roosters in the inner garden, contrasting starkly with the city’s pace. He adapted his house into a breeding ground after a health issue. Beto’s concerns about the development project reflect fear of losing a space tailored to his needs; he has the feeling that, in the condominium, ‘his lifestyle would change forever and there would be no way to adapt the new space to the work he does’ (personal communication, 15 September 2019).
Beyond moral questions about cockfights, his case shows how the project could disrupt established living strategies for vulnerable residents. This ethnographic data shows that ‘doing home’ includes practices like cock breeding, generating experiences that construct meaning ‘within the current of life activities’ (Ingold, 2021: 154). The meaning of home stems from people’s engagement with their environment, making dwelling a relationship between doing and experiencing in confrontation with the spatial and material (McFarlane, 2011: 651). Through adapting their home to life events and practices like indoor farming, people create meaning. The adaptability and flexibility of the auto-constructed house make it more than just measured space.
During the project’s participation process, discussions explored the meaning of home versus house and the relationship between living and livelihood. Pérez (2020), who studied the participatory process, describes a resident questioning how apartment buildings would meet residents’ needs to combine livelihoods with homes. Pérez (2020) suggests high-rise housing introduces ‘destabilizing property practices’ due to limitations on expanding houses or having businesses within homes (p. 1515). Other research (Hurtado-Tarazona and Rinaudo-Velandia, 2022; Muñoz and Fleischer, 2022; Pérez, 2020) and our ethnographic data show that residents’ reluctance to remain stems not only from economic reasons or spatial opportunities, but also from invisible emotional reasons related to restrictions on practices that turn houses into homes.
This is in line with Muñoz’s (2018) argument that any discussion of urban justice should begin at the scale of the home, as it encompasses not only material spaces but also emotions and identity. While redistributive justice may be addressed, recognizing plural practices and experiences – adaptability, flexibility, and possibility – that make a home requires another form of recognition. Even if a process exhibits procedural justice, it is necessary to go beyond the physical and address the emotional and unstable meanings of home to reclaim the right to the city. This also suggests that, when hermeneutic injustices result from overlooking private experiences, the practices by which residents ‘do home’ should not merely be shared in community meetings but elevated to a public concept (Fürst, 2023) of ‘home versus house’.
Community versus public spaces
The second form of experiential injustice relates to the tension between community versus public spaces. The project will increase public space in the neighborhood. Still, Fenicia residents feared losing a quality of public space that is less related to its size and more to its uses and relational qualities (Low and Smith, 2013; Soja, 2013). Public spaces are central to democratic life as they generate a public realm where democratic citizenship and social interaction occur (Lofland, 1998: 9). Understanding how citizens use public spaces and relate to each other via street interactions before the project is crucial to understanding their hesitations about post-development public space. Due to industrial origins, the neighborhood had ample streets for trucks and buses, with narrow pedestrian paths (see Calle 22 in Figure 1). Residential homes along side streets running up the mountain created closed pockets where families gather (see area 5 in Figure 1). Over time, Fenicia families developed familial relationships through ‘parochial spaces’ (Lofland, 1998) in these pockets.
To understand the meaning of that, we build on Lofland’s definition of parochial realms that are characterized by a sense of commonality among acquaintances and neighbors involved in interpersonal networks within ‘communities’ (Lofland, 1998: 10). This difference underlines the value of community versus public spaces. These spaces are not solely geographical or physical, but rather social and relational (Lofland, 1998: 11).
In the evenings, people gather in front of their houses to sit on the sidewalk and accompany children playing outside. This experience created a tight-knit community where families have lived on the same street for over four generations. A local tradition exemplifies the parochial space families developed in front of their homes: During December and January, when universities and schools are closed and work schedules lighter, the parochial space comes alive with ‘Sancocho cooking’. This hearty chicken soup from Colombia’s rural areas is cooked over wood fires in the street. The communal preparation transforms the street: neighbors bring ingredients collectively, set out chairs, and music fills the block. Women prepare ingredients while men set up the fire and cooking pot. After hours of simmering, people share the soup with plates from their homes while children play. (Fieldnotes, 20 September 2018)
Throughout the year, private space extends into public areas on these closed streets. People bring chairs outside to enjoy the sun or tend to small orchards in front of their houses. Some even work on projects outdoors. One resident said, ‘I’d rather work on my woodworking projects here where I can talk with Juancho than have my wife screaming about the dust’ (personal communication, 3 December 2019). The fear of losing community space mobilizes the memory of Manzana 5’s development, which had similar street pockets facilitating neighborly interactions. The development (see Figure 1) added modern public space (Pérez, 2020), including a plaza for university events, sparking concerns among long-time residents. In conversation, Berta expressed her worries: I know the new project will have spaces like those [referencing City U’s Plaza], big, and spacious, and I think they even look nice. But I don’t think I’ll be able to sit there. Who would want to see an old lady like me, sitting in one of those modern chairs, soaking up the sun? (Berta, 3 December 2019, personal communication)
Making public space in Fenicia meaningful requires more than just participatory-designed public spaces. Meaningful public spaces in Fenicia should not be defined solely by their public character, but to the extent to which they are ‘not controlled by private individuals or organizations, and hence open to the general public’ (Madanipour, 1996: 144). A meaningful public space would allow for parochial space qualities, where public and private meanings overlap. It should enable celebration, community interactions, and shared cooking of local soup. This community space requires negotiations about ownership and meaning while embracing paradoxical binaries: safety/danger, inclusivity/exclusivity, public/private, and parochial meaning.
From promise to waiting
It has been more then 10 years since the regulatory framework was adopted and the first residents signed their lands over to the land trust, yet there has been no visible change in the neighborhood. According to initial plans, the first housing units should have been completed by 2020 to provide replacement housing and renew public spaces. Though the project hasn’t started, it has transformed community life as residents frame their lives as ‘in a state of waiting’.
While geographers view time as a human construct with multiple temporalities (Massey, 2001), few urban development studies analyze time. Two anthropological exceptions (Harms, 2013; Koster, 2020) distinguish between ‘people’s time’ versus ‘project time’. Koster argues that temporal experiences are integral to citizens’ experience of urban development, and that people are often evicted to places where other development occurs, making uncertainty recurrent for marginalized communities (Koster, 2020: 196). Our case supports the first point but differs on the second as the project prevented eviction. Our data show that the project’s length predominantly makes people’s experience one of ‘waiting’.
Waiting creates injustice for three reasons. First, it creates ‘temporal uncertainty that undermines people’s productive relationship to time as a way of structuring productive activity’ (Harms, 2013: 353). Juan Carlos, who has lived and run his business there since early life, appreciates the project’s potential: ‘we win, because we are going to have our properties valued. I have almost 300 meters, so I will receive almost 300 meters of built area’ (personal communication, 27 June 2024). However, he expresses frustration that waiting disrupts his ability to invest in his property. He argues this injustice could have been prevented with more transparency about timing, stating he could have created an alternative rental business had he known the timeline (personal communication, 27 June 2024). Waiting time had reduced his productivity (Harms, 2013: 354); [. . ..] Losing ten or twelve million pesos is not an option. The reality is that to achieve something worthwhile, you need to invest substantial money to make it attractive. But everything is frozen. That’s where we are now. (. . .). (Juan Carlos, 27 June 2024, personal communication)
Second, waiting turns active residents into passive subjects (Auyero, 2011). As homes were to be demolished, people stopped maintaining them, leaving leaks, mold, and broken windows. Residents stayed despite poor conditions because living in the city center provided irreplaceable access to urban services without transportation costs, outweighing inadequate housing conditions (Hurtado-Tarazona and Rinaudo-Velandia, 2022: 137). The passiveness of waiting created a stark gap between the intense participatory process and passive waiting reality, resulting in frustration and dependency. Carmen, a long-time resident with a house and commercial parking garage, expresses the loss felt by those who built plans around the project and are now in limbo. She notes the lack of communication since the participation process ended: [the last thing I heard] was two years ago, [. . .] previously they had us up to here with all the meetings [pointing out that they are saturated]. It was in the morning, in the afternoon, ehhh, we almost knew all the university campus [because all the meetings were inside the university] [. . .] And from a while ago nothing . . . .(Carmen, 27 June 2024, personal communication)
While Fenicia residents were treated as powerful agents during the participatory process in ‘project time’, the project ignores ‘people’s time’ and waiting experience. Waiting creates injustice through dependency and uncertainty, making people aware of their subordinate position to state power (Auyero, 2011). It serves as an active state mechanism to reinforce poor people’s domination (Auyero, 2011; Harms, 2013; Koster, 2020).
Third, waiting affects people unequally (Harms, 2013: 354). Elderly and young people experience ‘project time’ freezing their lives as they postpone life events. Carmen explains how ‘project time’ misaligns with her expected ‘people time’: Since 2014, they told us that by 2029, we might be living there [. . .], and now they say the construction companies are facing problems because of the current economic situation [. . .] If we keep waiting, I’ll die, and this project will be for my children or even grandchildren [. . .] (Personal communication, 27 June 2024)
‘Waiting for the project’ has permeated residents’ daily lives, altering how people interact with each other, their homes, urban space, and the participatory process. It is a form of hermeneutical injustice (Fricker, 2007; Fürst, 2023), as residents explain it as a private experience. Since waiting appears across community members and interviews, it should be considered a form of experiential injustice. It leaves residents in states of dependency, removing their personal agency (Auyero, 2011). If sharing the experience of ‘waiting’ were more publicly considered in urban renewal, it might become a public concept (Fürst, 2023: 235), pivotal to understanding experiential justice.
Conclusions
This paper contributes to theories of spatial justice and scholarship on urban renewal and participatory planning through theory- and ethnography-based ‘experiential justice’. We contribute to the extensive debates on justice by arguing that justice is not achievable through merely redistributive and procedural equity, but requires examination in real-world contexts and recognition of epistemic injustices (Balibar et al., 2012; Barnett, 2017; Fricker, 2007; Otsuki, 2021). Through reviewing redistributive and procedural approaches to spatial justice, we argued that geography and planning scholars’ integration of redistribution and recognition fails to capture invisible, situated forms of injustice in urban renewal processes. We identified three classic principles for just urban renewal: spatial and social justice are dialectically related; the equal distribution of capabilities and opportunities must acknowledge structural ‘differences’; and democratic processes are indispensable for just outcomes.
Building on critical scholarship, we added two principles: to arrive at justice through intersubjective engagement with the plural experiences of injustice in situated, real-world, and empirical contexts. And to study injustice in the often invisible, informal, and nuanced bottom-up experiences of its victims. These principles for ‘experiential justice’ emphasize everyday experiences of injustice (Barnett, 2017, 2018; Jaggar, 2009; Lake, 2018; Mott, 2018) and recognize the subtle manifestations of power (Fricker, 2007; Fürst, 2023). This approach addresses ‘justices-to-come’ by recognizing plural and changing experiences of (in)justice throughout urban renewal processes, before, during, and after construction (Fraser, 2000, 2009; Young, 1998).
Our arguments develop through ethnographic analysis of the Progresa Fenicia project in Bogotá, which addressed redistribution and procedural justice in urban development. This case study shows how just and unjust planning can occur simultaneously. The project seeks to address the classic principles through spatial and social interventions, using innovative land-use practices and social programs to develop capabilities. It included extensive participation, incorporating protest as collective learning, resulting in agreements signed by 93% of the traditional residents and a decree promoting just urban renewal practices.
Citizens spoke about the project as ‘a promise’, but when examining everyday experience over time, we find a different narrative. The case shows how recognition means more than ‘listening’, and developing profit, compensation, and programs for marginalized citizens. The project addresses redistribution and procedural justice, but falls short in offering ongoing recognition. Our phenomenological critique suggests an intimate relation between recognition and redistribution; without recognition of the contextual/historical dimensions of urban justice, attempts at material redistribution (however progressive and innovative) will fall short. To develop recognitional justice, we must broaden our notion of justice to be sensitive to plural experiences, recognize justice’s empirical situatedness, and learn continuously and collaboratively about changing (in)justice throughout the planning process.
Our ethnographic materials teach us three dimensions of experiential justice through these principles. We showed how a home’s meaning differs from merely owning space in a new building. To ensure the willingness of traditional residents to stay, discussions about the new house should include understanding the intangible meanings of a home versus a house. As home encompasses practices and experiences that constitute an ‘assemblage of dwelling’ (Jacobs and Smith, 2008; McFarlane, 2011), it should facilitate local customs. In auto-constructed homes (Caldeira, 2017), customs aren’t static; homes allow families to grow, shrink, and expand. In Fenicia, residents worried about customs that could no longer be performed in their new condominium lives. Experiential justice considers homes’ diverse meanings beyond distributive promises.
Understanding public spaces provided a second experiential insight. Although the project increases public space, the communities’ inability to use it for informal celebrations and shared activities means that these spaces will lose their communal and parochial (Lofland, 1998) meaning. Despite participatory meetings for public space design, learning about its meaning should extend beyond meeting rooms into the streets where Sancocho is prepared.
Third, urban planning processes show a difference between ‘people’s time’ versus ‘project time’ (Koster, 2020). In Fenicia, time was invested in a just procedure, but waiting began once residents signed up for the community-owned land trust. Waiting captures someone in uncertainty, preventing citizens from making life choices, developing business, and leaving unsafe homes. This temporal uncertainty undermines productivity and is experienced unevenly across genders (Harms, 2013). The experience of ‘waiting’ is a hermeneutical injustice as it is understood privately. Urban planning projects should consider waiting time and make it a topic in participatory meetings and planning projects, shifting it from a phenomenological concept to a public issue (Fürst, 2023: 235).
The meaning of home and community in our ethnographic case study is embedded in Bogotá’s history as a city where internally displaced people developed self-constructed neighborhoods over decades. Waiting is even more significant in the context of a history of expropriation where the current project achieved 93% community approval. All these people share a history that brings fear and uncertainty, and are now depending on the project’s promises; they are eager yet waiting for the new future to begin.
While these experiential forms of injustice can transfer to other cities with participatory processes that overlook experiential views, a plethora of different issues may emerge in urban transformation. We hope that the two additional principles of experiential justice help to stimulate future research on other or similar dimensions of experiential (in)justice. We believe that this experiential approach contributes to developing spatial theories’ knowledge of socio-spatial injustices through phenomenological experience ‘within the current of life activities’ (Ingold, 2021: 154). Our critical iterations (Álvarez-Rivadulla, 2026) between theory, empirical findings, and practitioner reflections provide an understanding of experiential justice valuable to scholars and practitioners across the South and North. While justice in urban planning can be promoted through technical and procedural strategies, justice remains a practice of uncertainty. Strengthening recognition justice requires continuous learning about situated experiences and changing meanings of people’s fear, needs, and hope.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to all the residents and entrepreneurs of Fenicia. This study benefited greatly from conversations with Nathalia Franco Borrero, Clemencia Escallón, Maurix Suarez, and Juan Felippe Pinilla. We thank all who shared their knowledge with us for their openness. We thank Sergio Montero, Adriana Hurtado, Friederike Fleischer, and María José Álvarez-Rivadulla at Los Andes University for their generous hospitality during the first author’s research visit.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as part of the VENI talent grant (Vl.Veni.191S.050).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.