These are the opening words of an article by G.H. Pirie, which seemingly for the first time used the term spatial justice. However, he knew that his interpretation of space was similar to the then ‘familiar way as some kind of container, as an entity or physical expression made up of individual locations and their distance relations’ (Pirie, 1983: 471). As we have shown in Chapter 1, this conceptualisation of justice and spatiality fails to recognise that injustices not only happen in space, but are also created, maintained and exacerbated by it. It is this recognition that is at heart of the three chapters that make up this section of the book. All three pay homage to Lefebvre's concept of ‘the right to the city’ and consider the city as a key site of politics. They argue that the right to the city is about having access to all aspects of urban life as well as the making of the city. It is about the city being shaped not for us but by us. The authors draw on their knowledge and experience of Newcastle (and Delhi in Chapter 6) to provide examples of the various ways in which the dialectical relationship between (in) justices and spatiality are played out in the everyday life of citizens and their experience in and of the city.

The section starts with Chapter 6 in which Suzanne Speak and Ashok Kumar show why we need to consider all cities as ordinary and distinct cities even if they are labelled differently as global cities or world cities. They show how seemingly very different cities, Newcastle and Delhi, share similar struggles for space, between economy and society, nature and development, the affluent and the poor. They argue that despite their perceived position on the urban hierarchy or typology, both cities are the sites of some common political contestations.