La justice spatiale comme pragmatique

Spatial Justice as Pragmatic. An Experimental Approach to the Reorganisation of the Swiss Hospital Map. Since the reorganisation of hospital systems are on the agenda in most developed countries, this research project aims to know and render geographically precise citizens' arguments, with the identification and implementation of what could be considered as spatial justice as the issue. The theoretical notion of spatial justice is a recent one, and this new reality encounters another one, that of debates on territorial public policy. Rationales, which for a longtime seemed taken for granted, are now put into question. Furthermore, the apposition of the terms "justice" and "spatial" cannot be reduced to simply applying existing spatial justice theories to the territory, but constitutes a new research field, as much for geography as for political science. Defining spatial justice is in fact defining a possible being-there together, and thus producing a spatial "social contract", that is to say the spatial component of what, beyond the debates on the notion's relevance, could be called a social contract. Our research project is situated at the frontiers of the geography of actors, the sociology of justification, the political science of legitimate configurations, and ethical and political philosophy. It combines methods and knowledge coming from the social sciences of space, mathematics applied to social sciences, econometrics, and political philosophy. It combines theoretical reflection and formal modeling to an experimental framework. It would consist in placing the actors into a simulated situation at the heart of a generic yet realistic space, and then questioning them about this setting, and on the values which define for them a just space.