Equality and Space

Matilda Carter

University Place 6.205 (hybrid) 

In 2021, Anthony Braithwaite, a black single parent of a disabled child, was declared “intentionally homeless” by Lewisham Council after refusing to accept relocation to another borough of London. John-Russell Barnes, a white working-class boy from Hastings, south-east England, told the BBC in 2020 that he and his friends were deterred from attending university by the perceived requirement to move far away from their hometowns. According to research conducted by the Forest Peoples Programme, the five countries that contain the majority of the world’s tropical forests have used the need to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a justification for accelerating development plans, threatening the displacement of indigenous peoples.

Since the publication of Elizabeth Anderson’s 1999 article ‘What is the Point of Equality?’, contemporary egalitarian theory has taken a relational turn. Insofar as philosophers operating under this theoretical framework have explicitly addressed issues such as race, gender and sexuality, it has been reasonably successful, in Anderson’s terms, at redirecting philosophical attention toward the “distinctly political aims of egalitarianism”. Yet, when considered in light of the three cases raised above, contemporary egalitarian theory appears ill-equipped to provide analyses of and solutions to spatial inequalities.

The Oxford University Press’s 2015 edited collection on social equality contains no references to issues of gentrification or displacement, but does feature discussions about how spouses might choose their holiday locations, whether or not a “white skin appreciation society” would be a cause for concern in a society without a history of racial injustice, and whether or not a racist customer wrongs a shopkeeper by quietly shopping elsewhere without alerting anybody to their behaviour. While these may be interesting philosophical questions in their own right, their prominence indicates the extent to which, in Anderson’s terms “recent egalitarian writing seems strangely detached from existing egalitarian political movements.”

There is a pressing need to correct this error by providing avenues for the discussion of and production of theory about issues of equality and space.