Modernizing the City: Legal Mentality and Multiple Scale of Actions in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article by merging three different historical examples shows that legal mentality influences the management of similar public goods, the composition of institutional change in the urban sphere and finally the character of legal regulations best fitted in a given circumstances for arriving at desired outcome. We showed that the inclinations for ex ante and ex post models are dependent on the concept of public administration and, most particularly, of administrative law. In a way, in the mixed public administration shown in the Roman law example, where both centralize and polycentric governance are applied, much depends on the narrative and values which accompany the institutional change in urban settings.