ABSTRACT
Spatial planning affects the formal rights which people can exercise over land and buildings, and also the access to and use of land and buildings by people who have no formal rights over them. Those are ‘benefits’ which land and buildings can bestow or take away, and spatial planning can affect the distribution of such benefits. Distributive justice is about the moral rightness of how benefits are distributed between people. Four different ideas about distributive justice are relevant here: utilitarian justice, egalitarian justice, justice as sufficiency, justice of frameworks. Each has its own implications for planning practice and for legal approaches to planning.
