Measuring spatial justice for equal access to social opportunities (A case study of Ghazvin city)

Achieving development needs establishing a kind of balance within the city which can be defined as Spatial Justice. Equal social opportunity is one of the most important factors of urban justice based on which most of citizens can find appropriate opportunities for their specific qualifications; the realization of this goal can bring the sense of fairness among residents and give originality and identification to the development of city, a kind of development. Thus, the society get closer to the realization of the justice because justice cannot be achieved without access to equal opportunities. This research aims to evaluate the Spatial Justice in the region1 of Qazvin City (in which the historical urban area is located) according to accessibility of social opportunities. It is an applied research and its method is descriptive-analytical; in addition to use the documents and library studies, data collection is done by field observation, questionnaire and interviews, and Cochran formula has been used for calculation of the sample size. According to the conceptual model of the research, equal social opportunity can be evaluated by three categories of main indicators: the right to be present in the city, access to the basic needs of life and the right to be different. Also, for each of these main indicators, sub-indicators were defined. All of indicators and sub indicators have been weighed by analytic hierarchy process (AHP). Results show that there is an equal access to the basic needs of life in the region, but low level the indexes of access to social opportunities and the right to be different have reduce the level of spatial justice in case study.