Between socio-spatial and urban justice: Rawls’ principles of justice in the 2011 Israeli Protest Movement

The occupy movement of summer 2011 provides an opportunity to examine practical and theoretical implications of the notion of planning justice and human rights. Analyzing the discourse by activists in a planning team associated with the Israeli Protest Movement reveals inner conflicts and debates regarding the meanings of justice and human rights in planning. The discourse exposes an ongoing rift between spatial professionals (mainly geographers, planners, and architects) and subfields (municipal and governmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations, and academia) related to applying ideas of just planning in the Israeli context. Specifically, two opposing schemas of planning justice appear—that of socio-spatial justice and urban justice. A further investigation links each schema with a different principle of justice, as defined in Rawls’ Theory of Justice: The first schema is associated with the principle of difference and the second with the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Together, the unsettled conflicts hint at an inconsistency occurring when the theory is interpreted in practice.