Season’s greetings

Our motif: 
Spatial justice – a key challenge in sustainable transformation

At the turn of the year, we would like to use our illustration to draw attention to spatial justice. At the IOER, it is a central concern of our work. And it is crucial for the profound change towards sustainability.

Spatial justice asks how benefits and burdens, rights and opportunities are distributed, and how participation in transformation processes and access to relevant knowledge are provided. Whether in neighbourhoods, city-regions, rural hinterlands, global peripheries or centres – the development of all these spaces can give rise to various inequalities, especially across different scale levels.

How are regions affected by environmental pollution and climate risks, and what responsibility do they or others bear for this? Who benefits from adaptation to climate change, and who bears the costs? Who creates knowledge and who can use it to adapt, participate in change or benefit from it? Which groups or cultures remain excluded, whose interests are taken into account, and who finally decides on changes or actively shapes them?

If sustainability transformations are to succeed, answers to these questions are needed. At the IOER, we investigate how spatial injustices arise and how we can overcome them. Our work aims to contribute to spatial development “that enables people to thrive within ecological boundaries while ensuring planetary justice”. This is also stated in our Leitbild. We do not do this alone, but together and in lively exchange with like-minded people from science and practice.

In 2025, we have made issues of spatial justice the central theme of a summer school, in collaboration with partners. Under the heading „Justice in an interlinked world“, mid-career scholars and practitioners addressed spatial injustices in the context of urban and rural areas as well as the Global South and Global North. They broadened their view from different perspectives on justice to issues of distribution, recognition and participation, particularly with regard to intersectionality and regeneration. The summer school enabled participants to engage with how spatial configurations and sustainability transformation processes may inadvertently reproduce injustices.

This was not the first time that the topic of justice had been the focus of a summer school. To anyone who conducts research in collaboration with diverse societal actors or with the aim of actively initiating and accompanying processes of societal change – in other words, to anyone who conducts transdisciplinary or transformative research – we warmly recommend the position paper “Doing Justice! Doing Just This! Practicing justice in transdisciplinary and transformative research“. It is the result of a summer school of the same name, which the IOER and the Leibniz Research Network “Spatial Knowledge for Society and Environment” had already hosted in 2023.

Spatial justice will remain a central concern of the IOER in the future. For 2026, we look forward to joint research and project work focusing on spatial justice in transformative contexts. Last but not least, the 4th IOER Conference "Space & Transformation" in 2026, entitled "Digitalisation meets Transformative Governance", will address how infrastructures, changes in land use, digitalisation and the change towards sustainability are creating new spatial divisions or opening up opportunities for a more equitable spatial future. 

We invite anyone who is interested to work with us on these exciting questions and to design places where sustainability is fair, inclusive and robust.