Justice as a criterion for assessing the ‘quality’ of urban space (and the happiness of its residents)

The article is a review-reflection on the book by D. Harvey Social Justice and the City (Moscow: New Literary Review; 2018). Despite the fact that social justice is in the title of the book as its focus, the researcher of justice would be disappointed, because justice is rather a cross-cutting idea of the political-economic analysis of the spatial organization of the city; however, the results of this analysis would inevitably make the reader think in terms of ‘justice-injustice’. Such a presentation of justice together with the eclectic text can become advantages of the book for researchers of social well-being: if the place of residence is a criterion of life satisfaction, the ‘quality’ of the place of residence (including fair urban planning and the type of social differentiation of the urban space) significantly influences social well-being, which the author shows very convincingly in both liberal and socialist (in his terms) discourses, but clearly prefers the Marxist methodology supplemented by some other conceptual approaches.