Spatial Justice Models: An Exploratory Analysis on Fair Distribution of Opportunities

Abstract

Equity, fairness, and justice are related concepts widely discussed in several areas of study but remain an open field in terms of spatial justice and support decision systems application. Uneven spatial development have shown a tendency to amplify social inequalities alongside territories. To better understand the spatial configuration and spatial distribution of resources for different social groups, multiple objective criteria can be used to formulate optimal resource allocation. This work discusses spatial justice by utilitarianism and Rawlsian difference principle perspectives to formulate two models based on facility location problem (FLP) framework. Assuming the proximity to a desired opportunity (service or resource) as a measure of wellbeing and satisfaction, we weight the distances to the nearest facility by a social factor based on exponential function. Optimization results tend to favor outliers for weighted FLP, while the regular distances FLP formulation tend to favor heavy urban areas. We found that results are heavy context based, as the distribution of social groups are determinant in optimization process.