The city requires a spanning of matter and meaning, corporeality and abstraction, tangibility and inaccessibility, humanity and nonhumanity. The most prominent difficulty in defining the city is that, while the city is often considered to be constituted by signs, it continually distances itself from them. The city would be an
impossibility. It would always have to be considered as a spanning of a fissure, and in that sense, a precarious projection that tries to accommodate various opposing potentialities, both symbolic and material.

The city succumbs to the easy avenue of an anthropocentric phenomenological fusion between the symbolic and the observational. The concept of spatial justice takes the form of a question mark. It operates in an actual and symbolic space in everyday life and demands continuous assessment of where one positions oneself and why. I have previously defined the concept of spatial justice as the desire of an individual or collective body to occupy the same space at the same time as another body.

There are no easy solutions and certainly no possibility for justice across the board. Every situation needs to be dealt with on its merits. But they all have, first, the commonality of two or more bodies claiming the same space at the same time; and, second, the need to find another level of negotiation where the various parties are removed from their entrenched positions and a rapprochement of sorts can take place.