Putting Street Justice into Practice: Insights from London Boroughs

Street transformations are not merely technical responses to climate, health and liveability goals. They are political interventions that redistribute public space, mobility, environmental quality and decision-making authority. Yet justice rarely appears as an explicit concept in everyday street planning. This paper investigates why justice is invoked as a principle but seldom used as an operational category, how it nevertheless shapes practice, and which institutional and political conditions determine its influence. Conducted within the 32-partner Horizon Europe JUST STREETS programme, the study combines documentary analysis with 10 semi-structured interviews undertaken between October and December 2025 with practitioners working across several London borough contexts. We develop a street-specific framework integrating distributive, procedural, recognition and epistemic justice across streets’ dual functions as links and places and across the transformation project cycle. The findings show that practitioners usually articulate justice through administratively established concepts such as safety, accessibility, health, equality, air quality and inclusion. These concepts connect more readily than justice to statutory duties, departmental responsibilities, funding criteria, technical standards and measurable outcomes. Explicit justice language becomes most salient when practitioners question the inherited allocation of street space, challenge car-centred assumptions or adjudicate between competing claims. Justice is therefore not absent from practice, but operates principally as a normative basis for determining whose needs should receive priority. Its dimensions are, however, unevenly institutionalised. Distributive and recognition concerns shape spatial prioritisation, kerbside reallocation, accessibility and child-centred design. Procedural justice remains largely confined to consultation rather than shared authority, while epistemic justice is constrained by the continuing dominance of professional and quantitative evidence. This unevenness is politically consequential: more specific policy language can enable intervention while obscuring redistribution, normalising inherited inequalities and weakening accountability. We conclude that street justice must be embedded throughout problem definition, design, implementation and evaluation, with explicit scrutiny of benefits, burdens, participation, recognition and evidentiary authority.