The mental aspects of urban justice

Life in cities is often a matter of extremes. It can be both stimulating and stressful. It can be socially enriching and isolating. It can involve encounters with political openness and with xenophobia. The kind of experiences one has in a city is not a mere matter of luck. Structural injustices and concrete policy decisions shape the lives of urban dwellers—not only what they do, but also what they feel, believe and desire. This is the guiding question of the research project I began last year at the University of Antwerp, titled Affect In the City (AFFINITY): The emotional dimensions of urban justice (2025-2028).

Cities are a main topic of investigation in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as some philosophical traditions—cities are in central works of Plato, Al-Farabi, Walter Benjamin, or Henri Lefevbre. The last few years have seen a booming number of philosophical works on cities from a broadly analytic approach (including books on spatial agency, urban equality and housing justice), as well as the creation of academic venues partly or wholly dedicated to urban space. I am myself a member-at-large of the Philosophy of the City Research Group, and there are other projects with a broader focus on philosophy of space at Stirling and Eichstätt. In the areas of moral and political philosophy, we can talk of the emergence of local normative theory, which has the local as the main target and scope and looks not only at cities, but also at rural space.

Project AFFINITY aims to highlight the role of mental life in local normative theory, by drawing from insights into affective and epistemic injustice, cognitive scaffolding, and theories of self-narration. The working assumption is that social conventions and policy applications have a great impact on people’s mental lives within urban settings, by shaping how they feel, how they act, and how they think about themselves and their surroundings.

As Joel Krueger argues, elements of the environment scaffold urban dwellers’ cognitive-affective processes, for example, whether people feel like they belong in the city or whether they believe they are welcome in certain spaces. Krueger focuses on the extreme kind of marginalization that occurs in homelessness. But the influence of elements of urban space on people’s minds can also be assessed more broadly.

Think of something as apparently trivial as traffic lights. In England, pedestrians have 6 seconds to cross during a green light. This is way too fast for disabled and elderly people. Or think about the names of your city’s streets. Do they commemorate people like you? Or do they perpetuate the belief that you need to be a certain kind of person for your city to be proud of you, or that only certain stories count? These elements of urban life do not merely create short-lived, isolated experiences of stress, discomfort, or alienation. Over time, they accumulate into significant harms to subjective well-being (including positive emotions and mental health) and block access to hermeneutical resources that are crucial to self-understanding.

The project will examine three dimensions of city life (belonging, environment, and narrative) to understand how policy decisions shape mental processes, and whether these effects align with the principles of urban justice. The first publication looks into the demands on policy-makers to ensure that disadvantaged people are not unfairly burdened at an emotional level by gentrification and migration. I am currently researching the affective harms of oversized cars, the legitimacy of anger against tourists, the connection between loneliness and the 15-minute city, and the influence of public urban commemoration in self-narration, as well as planning many exciting collaborations. In this way, project AFFINITY  aims to place the mental dimensions of urban justice at the centre of local normative theory. By doing so, it will help clarify what is needed for a good life in the city that is accessible to all, and guide the design of policies capable of addressing non-material urban problems—such as loneliness, lack of safety and disenfranchisement—which compound and reinforce social and economic inequalities.

Bio: Pilar Lopez-Cantero is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie/YUFE4Postdocs Fellow at the University of Antwerp, and is currently the Principal Investigator of project AFFINITY (grant No 101081327). She works on practical philosophy, ethics and political philosophy — particularly questions about personal relationships, self-narration, travel, and the city.