Reconceptualizing Justice in Human Geography: Landscape as Basic Structure, Justice as the Right to Justification

This article argues that geographers should rededicate themselves to developing a positive theory of justice. In the past fifty years, research has made enormous strides in theorizing injustice, but mostly geographers rely on commonsense and unexamined notions of justice as “fairness.” In this article, I trace this avoidance of justice theorizing to the way geographers originally engaged with Rawls’s foundation work and argue that his A Theory of Justice should be reexamined to better understand one of the central concepts: the “basic structure,” especially as it has been reformulated by feminist political theorists. I argue that the landscape is a key component of the basic structure and understanding it as such offers a first step in a positive theory of justice that is deeper than the commonsense justice-as-fairness. Having established landscape as basic structure, I then argue that a second step toward a full theory of justice would be to understand justice as the “right to justification” (as theorized by the Frankfurt School’s Forst). The end result—combining landscape as basic structure with justice as the right to justification—is a theory that allows for assessing both “minimally” and “maximally” just geographies.