The Planning Cycle in the Spatial Justice Package is intended to help planners, designers, policymakers, and community organisations integrate spatial justice into every stage of planning and decision-making. The central idea is simple, although humans have spent decades finding inventive ways to make it complicated: justice should not be an afterthought or an evaluation carried out once decisions have already been made. It should guide the entire planning process.
The cycle can be understood as six interconnected stages:
1. Problem Definition
The first question is not simply what is the problem? but whose problem is it?
A spatial justice perspective requires identifying:
* Who benefits from existing arrangements.
* Who bears costs or risks.
* Which groups are excluded, marginalised, or invisible.
* How inequalities are spatially distributed.
This stage is closely linked to recognitional justice, because planning problems are often framed in ways that overlook certain groups and forms of knowledge.
2.
