Spatial Justice in the Lawscape

Resumo

The connection between law and the city is an increasingly relevant area of transdisciplinary research currently explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. Existing approaches, however, have not adequately focussed on the fusion between the law and the space of a city, the geographical physicality of the urban in its material ontology on the one hand, and the operations of the law within such materiality on the other. This chapter builds on my previous work on the concept of the Lawscape, which has shown that law’s reluctance of the law to grapple with urban space may well be on account of the counter-intuitiveness of the connection: positive law greatly relies on its immateriality, its objective, abstract application independently of spatial parameters. I argue here that the lawscape is the surface on which the concept of spatial justice emerges as a true interstice. The problem with spatial justice, however, is that it is woefully undertheorised and usually equated with rather innocuous constructions such as social justice and democracy. Employing a Deleuzian approach, I offer a conceptualisation of spatial justice not as synthesis but as emergence from the folds of the lawscape.