spatial justice in urban scale in iran; meta- study of selected articles’ theoretical famework

contemporary cities from many aspects have challenges with the phenomenon of injustice and in different areas suffer from the distribution of benefits, housing, and access to services. meanwhile, the spatial justice and related studies have raised in response to these issues as an emerging and interdisciplinary field. hence, justice has become a principal goal of urban planning in its institutions and grassroots forms. in parallel, in the last decade in iran, spatial justice has also been the fundamental issue in the field of urban studies. several scholars have contributed and commented to this issue. also, various researches have been conducted in this academic field. activists seeking a more fair distribution of the benefits and burdens of society have increasingly turned to broader coalitions of justice. therefore, this paper intends to analyze theoretical framework of researches in the realm of urban spatial justice in iran. the article is based on a mixed method research plan and meta-study strategy. meta-study is a second-order analysis that seeks to not only synthesize the results of prior works, but also to reflect upon the processes within that research. the research design of this meta-study is developed by paterson et al., which itself was based on zhao’s approach. the two phases of the meta - study are analysis and synthesis. the analysis must take place before synthesis in order to generate new and more complete understandings of the phenomenon under study. in order to perform this meta-study, the databases of all articles published in iranian journals and elated papers presented at the congress, and the student thesis was searched. finally, the study population consists of 44 articles with a focus on spatial justice in the period 1383-1394. also, methods such as systematic review and open coding were used to collect and analyze the data. then, a comprehensive form for summarizing and extracting data from selected researches were prepared to include categories about the article details and the theoretical framework. the results indicate that the concept of spatial justice is of great value today in iran to geography and urban planning in particular since it is a concept which transcends disciplinary boundaries. howbeit, there are shallow studies in the interdisciplinary realm of spatial justice too. also, it is necessary to say that many researches are based on the presumption of socialist definition of justice. therefore, more articles were addressed in distribution approach of spatial justice based on equality. in these articles justice is frequently evaluated on the basis of “results” or spatial distributions .meanwhile, they neglected the structural roots of injustice in the form of spatial justice. these roots engage with issues of representational space where identities and experiences constitute the process of justice. distributive justice is a necessary but not sufficient aspect of a normative pitch in planning, which is badly needed. it fails to address the causes of injustice, which are structural and lie in the role of power. so it is better for the further studies of spatial justice to focus on decision-making procedures.