Spatial (In) Justice: How Does It Manifest in the Built Environment?

Explores how spatial justice shapes equitable, empowering, and inclusive experiences

In an era increasingly defined by questions of equity and inclusion, Spatial (In) Justice: How Does It Manifest in the Built Environment? offers a vital, global interrogation of how architecture and planning impact the lived experiences of marginalized communities. Edited by Adnan Zillur Morshed, this timely volume brings together contributions from 30 leading thinkers and practitioners—architects, planners, scholars, and designers—who reflect on the ethical and philosophical responsibilities of those who shape space.

Rather than offering simplistic answers or prescriptive solutions, this book explores the complex and often contradictory ways justice is interpreted and enacted through space. The essays examine built projects from around the world to ask whether design can foster dignity, hope, and community empowerment—and how design education must evolve to foreground these values. The contributing authors grapple with the mechanisms through which spatial practices can exclude, disempower, or uplift, addressing topics ranging from justice in the city to the politics of community engagement. Throughout the book, the essays advance a critical pedagogy of design—one that scrutinizes how space organizes power and shapes human possibility.

A far-reaching examination of how built environments can either reinforce or resist social injustice, this innovative volume:

• Provides a compelling framework to understand justice not just as a legal or moral abstraction, but as a tangible, constructed reality embedded in our daily environments
• Offers in-depth critical reflections on spatial justice across both the Global North and Global South
• Engages with interdisciplinary voices beyond traditional design fields, such as environmentalists, social scientists, and urban theorists
• Incorporates real-world examples of justice-oriented design in rural, urban, and transitional spaces
• Contextualizes three decades of social justice movements within spatial and urban practice
• Raises timely philosophical and pedagogical questions about equity in design education

Investigating the intersection of infrastructure, social reform, and public space through a justice-centered framework, Spatial (In) Justice: How Does It Manifest in the Built Environment? is ideal for advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses in architecture, urban design, city planning, urban sociology, and public health. It is well-suited for degree programs in architecture, urban studies, environmental design, social policy, and public administration.

Adnan Zillur Morshed is an architect, architectural historian, urban theorist, and professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at The Catholic University of America. He is the Founder-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism (Ci+AU) at BRAC University, a Fulbright Specialist (2021–2025), and a TEDx speaker. His publications and research focus on global architectural history, spatial justice, histories of water and the built environment, ecological urbanism, and urban poverty. Morshed is the author of multiple books, including Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015), DAC: Dhaka in Twenty-Five Buildings (Altrim Publishers, 2017), and Dhaka Delirium (Altrim Publishers, 2023), has held fellowships at the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, and was featured in the documentary Louis Kahn's Tiger City.