Viewpoint: Geography and Social Justice: Some Reflections on Social Change in Eastern Europe
Abstract
Explicit consideration of social justice has become muted in geography in recent years. Yet social change in various parts of the world, especially Eastern Europe, is generating renewed interest in the question of who should get what, where. This paper provides a brief reminder of the main issues associated with the concept of social justice in general, and of its territorial application. It goes on to consider some of the implications of the introduction of market economies in Eastern Europe, and suggests that the privatization of state assets should be guided by explicit principles of social justice. If market exchange relations are to predominate in the distribution of benefits and burdens in these changing societies, it is important to get certain starting conditions which drive markets right, in a moral sense, at the outset.References
Buzlyakov, N. (1973) Welfare the Basic Task. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Harvey, D. (1973) Social Justice and the City. London: Edward Arnold.
Graaff, J. De V. (1957) Theoretical Welfare Economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kolosov, V. A. (1989) Socialist federalism and spatial equity: Review of a discussion. Soviet Geography, 30(4):662-9.
Samuleson, P. A. (1973) Economics. New York: McGraw-Hill (9th edition)
Smith, D. M. (1977) Human Geography: A Welfare Approach. London: Edward Arnold.
Smith, D. M. (1979) Where the Grass is Greener: Living in an Unequal World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Smith, D. M. (1987) Geography, Inequality and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, D. M. (1989) Urban Inequality under Socialism: Case Studies from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Up-Date series).
Szelenyi, 1. (1983) Urban Inequalities under State Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zaslavskaya, T. (1990) Perestroika and socialism. In Soviet Sociology in Conditions of Perestroika. Moscow: Nauka, pp. 7-33.
- The contributor(s) (authors) warrant that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to this Journal and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in this work are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever.
- The contributor(s) warrant that the work contains no unlawful or libelous statements and opinions and liable materials of any kind whatsoever, does not infringe on any copyrights, intellectual property rights, personal rights or rights of any kind of others, nor contains any plagiarized, fraudulent, improperly attributed materials, instructions, procedures, information or ideas that might cause any harm, damage, injury, losses or costs of any kind to person or property.
- The contributor(s) retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- The contributor(s) are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
- Geography Research Forum may disseminate the content of the publications and publications’ Meta data in text, image, or other print and electronic formats to providers of research databases (e.g. EBSCO, GeoBase, JSTOR) to facilitate publications' exposure.
