Exploring Spatial justice

By Joey Ager

Where do you most experience a sense of belonging?

Perhaps it’s in your favorite chair at home, in your church sanctuary, your local coffee shop, or among the crowd supporting your local team. In these social spaces, that feeling of belonging is not an accident, it’s a feature of how those spaces have been shaped over time by the people who interact with them. 

The physical and social characteristics of spaces of all kinds - cities, neighborhoods, churches, parks, homes - both reflect the lives of the people who make them, and also deeply shape those of us who use them. 

In our work with communities that are designing for peace by reimagining buildings and land in line with a vision of peace, we’re working together to bring about living, vital, thriving social spaces that nurture belonging, wellbeing, and community. This work takes seriously that people shape spaces, and spaces shape people. As a consequence, the choices we make that shape our spaces - our homes, our gathering spaces, our church buildings, our cities - are mirrors of who we are and the future we are hoping to bring about.

In the Pacific Northwest, many Lutheran church buildings bear a striking resemblance to upturned longships. The physical spaces these immigrant Scandinavian communities built reflect a cultural viewpoint, and have long continued to powerfully shape the identity of those gathered under their vaulted ceilings. 

In one church I visited recently in a small town in Washington, the sign above the sanctuary reads ‘Velkommen!’ in Norwegian. The irony implicit in this sign - that it primarily welcomes you if you already belong - was recognized by church leaders working diligently to build trust and relationships with neighbors in a town where over 30% of the population speaks Spanish or indigenous Central American languages. An early project of theirs was to put up signs across their campus in the languages spoken by their neighbors. 

In Idaho, where a recent state law imposes criminal penalties on trans people using public restrooms in line with their gender identity, congregations are reflecting together on how to create a network of inclusive, gender neutral bathrooms available to all.

In Tacoma, a multicultural church in the heart of a historically Black community that has experienced the whiplash of rapid gentrification over the last two decades is designing a dense on-site housing development aimed at resisting displacement of Black families and creating pathways for home ownership. 

Each of these choices are rooted in the value at the heart of the work of Design for Peace: one that geographer Edward Soja has called spatial justice, which entails co-designing social spaces that bring about the future we all need. 

This is critical work at this moment. How space is understood has always been politically and theologically constructed. The Doctrine of Discovery - the Christian theological justification for the colonial conquest of the Americas - has long been underpinned by an argument about space: that the land could be considered ‘empty’ because those who stewarded it were seen as uncivilized, and were not Christians. 

In this age of increasing social isolation, we need to urgently re-design interactive social spaces rooted in an alternative theological and political vision, one best captured by Gerard Winstanley of the Wigan Diggers at St George’s Hill in 1649: ‘the Earth was made a common Treasury for all!.’ 

At Design for Peace, we are moved by this ancient and modern vision, and we commit to the work of collaborative Spatial Justice design with churches, communities and leaders to bring about spaces that reflect the future we all need. 

For more reading: 

• Sarah Augustine - The Land is Not Empty 

• Edward Soja - Seeking Spatial Justice

• Gerard Winstanley - A Common Treasury