Making Space for Social Justice

The essay deals with the spatial organisation of daily life that qualifies our citizenship opportunities. The political season defined as neoliberal has been accompanied by the contraction of the public spaces that shape our interactions as everyday citizens. This contraction has reduced the repertoire of citizenship roles available to us. This essay will look at the relevance of spaces-in-common and social infrastructure, as well as their enabling capacities based on ritual-like interaction regimes. These ritual interaction regimes feed the so-called capacity to aspire, where individual needs and collective solutions meet under the banner of a sense of justice. The paper defends the idea that we feel part of a collective project oriented towards a more just future if, in a shared space, we commit ourselves with others in the pursuit of a “citizenship good”. That is, a good that makes our formal rights concrete and implementable and which we take care of—protesting, collaborating, managing it or improving it together with others—through an action visible to a third party who judges it as worthy of public value.