Urban Law Research Articles

O direito nas políticas públicas urbanas e habitacionais: o uso de instrumentos urbanísticos no município de Santo André, São Paulo

Adopting categories of analysis through which law can be understood as an objective, a tool or an institutional arrangement of public policies, the article describes the experiences from implementing urban and housing legal instruments in the municipality of Santo André-SP in 1988-2010. Reflecting different "city visions" endorsed by local public officials, three distinct moments are analyzed in order to identify struggles, ruptures, continuities, bottlenecks and innovations, and, from a methodological standpoint, explore the applied dimension of the legal framework in the routine of public administration.Keywords: urban public policy, urban law, housing policies, legal urban instruments, City Statute.

AN EVALUATION TO IDENTIFY THE BARRIERS TO THE FEASIBILITY OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT PLANS: FIVE DECADES OF EXPERIENCE IN URBAN PLANNING IN IRAN

The rapid urbanization in many developing countries has indicated several challenges in different aspects. This is due to inefficient urban planning approaches towards managing the development process. Similar to many other developing countries, Iran has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades. Although over the last few decades, urban planning processes have been applied to develop Iranian cities, urban planning has failed to tackle the challenges facing the cities. This paper seeks to identify the barriers that have prevented Iranian cities from achieving the goals of urban planning. The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the current literature on the concept of urban planning and to assess the urban development plan process in Iranian cities. The required data were collected through a review of international theoretical studies, Iranian experimental research and governmental reports. The findings of this study reveal five major barriers to the feasibility of the urban planning process, including the urban plans context, structure of urban planning, related law and regulations, public participation, and financial resources.

Participatory urban planning in Brazil

This paper focuses on participatory urban planning as a model of urban reform and democratic invention in Brazil. Its case material regards the formulation and implementation of two sets of urban laws of very broad consequence. First, we discuss briefly the chapter on urban policy in the 1988 Citizen Constitution and the federal law that it mandates. The latter is the Estatuto da Cidade, the City Statute, from 2001, which required that 1600 cities (approximately 30%) of Brazilian municipalities either create Master Plans or reformulate existing ones according to its principles and on the basis of popular participation. Second, we focus on São Paulo’s Master Plan (2002) and Zoning Law (2004) that fulfill this requirement and on the Plan’s required revision in 2007. By examining this massive constitutionally mandated formulation of urban policy, our aim is to analyse the development of a new paradigm of urban policy that reinvents master planning.

«Чужие» в средневековом городе (по материалам фрайбургского городского права)

«Чужие» в средневековом городе (по материалам фрайбургского городского права)

Peter Sandby-Thomas, Legitimating the Chinese Communist Party since Tiananmen: A Critical Analysis of the Stability Discourse

China’s obsession with “stability maintenance” (weiwen) is witnessed in its rapidly increasing budget allocation to internal security in recent years. Vast institutions for maintaining stability, such as the Ministry of State Security, People’s Armed Police, public security bureaus, and urban administrative and law enforcement agencies (chengguan), are being constructed or expanded. However, as Gramsci would have put it, securing “cultural hegemony” in a society is more durable than the use of sheer force. In this book, Peter Sanby-Thomas argues that economic performance and nationalism, the two commonly identified sources of legitimacy for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are inadequate, and suggests an additional ideational source of legitimacy; namely, the use of stability discourse. Drawing from key editorials and commentaries in the People’s Daily, Sandby-Thomas examines how the official stability discourse responded to the three large-scale demonstrations in the past 20 years—the Tiananmen protests of 1989, the Falungong protests of 1999, and the “anti-Japan” demonstrations in 2005. In his research, Sandby-Thomas engages in what is called the “discourse-historical approach” of critical discourse analysis, in which he undertakes intensive analysis of selected texts with appropriate analysis of the context of the texts as well. The book begins with a discussion of the concept of legitimacy. Sandby-Thomas finds the usual Weberian typology to be overly structuralist, and introduces the “strategic-relational” approach, which attempts to transcend the structure-agency dualism by using concepts such as “strategically selective context” and “strategic actor” in place of the usual categories of structure and agency, in order to avoid overdeterministic accounts of realities. Instead, the concept of strategy allows the interplay between strategic actors and their selective context. The whole point of this discussion is to open up the space for “the inclusion of the ideational” (p. 32), which mediates J OF CHIN POLIT SCI (2014) 19:231–232 DOI 10.1007/s11366-014-9295-1

The Poor and the Modern City: Recognition and Misrecognition of the Carpas Shows in Mexico City (1890-1930)

“The Poor and the Modern City: Recognition and Misrecognition of the Carpas Shows in Mexico City (1890-1930)” explores the spatial modernization of the Mexican capital via a study of the carpas as an indicator of social class. The author's stated goal is to show “how the local authorities utilized arguments to protect the urban space against those they imagined, and constructed, as the poor,” also stating that the new urban laws caused physical separation of social groups. In this sense, this essay analyses “how the elites and the people of the carpas internalized their respectively superior and subordinated class positions as if they were natural.” To prove her hypothesis, the author studies “the dialogues in legal documents between the state and citizens,” within a theoretical framework of ideas by Nancy Fraser (misrecognition), Anibal Quijano (coloniality of power), and Angel Rama (the Lettered City).

Las competencias urbanísticas y la planificación metropolitana en el estado autonómico español y en el federalismo brasileño

This article makes a comparative analysis between the Spanish and Brazilian Urban Law, from the perspective of territorial and urban planning. Taken the basis of the constitutional rules that distribute powers to public authorities of both countries, and also the main laws that regulate the matter, as the case of RD 2/2008 of 20 June, approving the revised Land Law (TR/08, in Spain) and the Statute of the Cities (Law No. 10.257, f June 21, 2001 in Brazil). Besides that, highlight some differences between countries, such as the structure of the States —Spanish Parliamentary Monarchy and Brazilian Federal Republic— that is not an impediment to enable countries to use the legal constructions of the other country to improve its own system, especially in the metropolitan issue.

Una reflexión sobre los «nuevos» derechos. Perspectivas y desafíos en el siglo XXI

El presente trabajo pretende analizar el cambio de paradigmas derivado del proceso de transición de la Modernidad hasta la Posmodernidad y los desafíos enfrentados hoy en el campo jurídico. Asimismo, el objetivo es reflexionar sobre los llamados «nuevos» derechos, enfocados a partir del derecho ambiental y del derecho urbanístico, considerados los precursores de esta perspectiva en el Derecho posmoderno y, por fin, presentar los desafíos y las perspectivas de su consumación en el siglo XXI.

Policing Ourselves: A Republican Theory of Citizenship, Dignity and Policing - A Comment on Fagan

Legal scholars tend to have a binary view of police intervention; they naturally focus on whether a police officer was legally justified in engaging in any particular interaction. This view misses what may be the most important feature in most citizens’ interaction with the police, in particular the experience of the Black, Brown and poor. Policing is not only a question of whether a police stop is conducted but how a police stop is conducted. Our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence is both legally impoverished and practically limited because our Constitutional jurisprudence does not take note of how the police treat persons – whether one is subjected to racist language and purposeful humiliation – as part of the calculation of a reasonable search.Jeffrey Fagan’s contribution to this Fordham Urban Law Journal Symposium fills an important need by recognizing that how one is treated by the police is at least as important is if one is approached by the police. Fagan argues that recognizing the importance of dignity within our Fourth Amendment jurisprudence provides a legal response to commonplace acts of racist and humiliating policing. While Fagan is convincing in highlighting the need to import a commitment to reasonable dignity in police behavior, I argue in this comment that conceptions of human dignity are notoriously too broad and undefined to serve as a legal guide and additionally miss an important element in being wronged by the police. Rather, understanding that both the law and the police are especially tied to our place as citizens highlights the need for a republican view of the dignity of citizenship to guide our policing.

What Sort of Legal Space is a City?

A chapter in a forthcoming book on interstices, I consider the way in which a particular scalar logic of jurisdiction militates against an appropriately interstitial understanding of urban law.

2011 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Colored Rabbits, Dangerous Trees, and Public Sitting: Sidewalks, Police, and the City

Urban geographers would argue that cities are distinct spaces that need to be treated on their own terms. Yet I fear that we have not given the specificity of urban law its due. My aim is to give one crucial, yet easily overlooked urban legal practice, that of "police," more careful attention. By "police" I mean "the regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order" (Neocleous, 2000, p. 1). I focus on the sidewalk as a particular police space. I also wish to demonstrate the distinctiveness of police, particularly when compared with rights-based understandings of public space. Yet the two frequently collide, as we can see with reference to a constitutional challenge to a sit/lie ordinance in Seattle. Police won, as it usually does. But to accuse police of an assault upon rights is, in several senses, beside the point, for police operates in a different register. Police thus must be understood on its own terms and not reduced to other governmental logics.

A Cobrança do Imposto Predial e Territorial Urbano na Hipótese do § 2º do Artigo 32 do Código Tributário Nacional

This article makes a legal analysis of IPTU (URBAN PROPERTY AND LAND TAX) collection in so-called areas of urban expansion, presenting a conceptual study of such areas and demonstrating according to the doctrine and jurisprudence the possibility of collection of the tax under paragraph 2 of Article 32 of the National Tax Code, without having, for that, the observance of minimum requirements of the existence of improvements in the object study field. Key-words: rights - constitutional law - tax law – urban law

It's All About the People: Personal Jurisdiction, Lord of the Rings, and Classroom Communities in Civil Procedure I

This article describes my ongoing experiments with “learning communities” and “spiral curricula” in my Civil Procedure I classes, as influenced by my eight years as a sole practitioner in Western Kentucky. Despite endorsement from many education theorists and classroom teachers and potential effectiveness in combating student disaffection, neither has made more than the shallowest dent in legal education. “Classroom community” implies a less stratified and more culturally respectful education experience that is more rewarding, more honorable and more likely to be urban law school graduates’ professional future. Spiral curriculum design facilitates analytical depth that leads to a sense of the law’s rhythms critical to high performance as a generalist.My Spring 2009 Civil Procedure I class created my first “community in the classroom,” and its dynamics are repeatable. Students spun a web of intergenerational, multiplex relationships that are the essence of a “community of memory” and institutionalized the “patterns of commitment” that shaped the experiences of those who came later. These have led to enthusiasm about personal jurisdiction – “love” if you are “Michael – that is disproportionate to that topic’s entertainment value. Woven throughout this article are vignettes and voices that demonstrate students' engagement and emerging sense of justice.Part II explains my spiraling syllabus design that facilitates analytical depth and appreciation for the very real people their blossoming legal philosophies may govern. Part III describes the course’s assessment package – call it “Justice Brennan Meets The Lord of the Rings in 2009 – that tests analysis while reinforcing students’ sense of membership in a community with a past, present and future. The article concludes that the structure and content of the course facilitated unusually intense student engagement, enriched students’ academic experience, and opened a conceptual door to an alternate professional future.”

Rapid Urbanization as a Source of Social and Ecological Decay: A Case of Multan City, Pakistan

This paper concentrates on the relationship between rapid urbanization and socio-ecological problems. The major objective of this study is to analyze the unplanned and haphazard urbanization that is giving birth to environmental issues such as; pollution, poor drainage system, poor quality of drinking water and poor hygienic conditions. This research carried out in Multan city, Pakistan through field survey of 200 respondents using multistage sampling technique. Self-administrated questionnaire was used as a tool of data collection and the binary logistic regression was employed for the analysis of the data. The results depict that urbanization is one of the major causes of converging joint family system to the nuclear family system and its changing function as a consequence. It is also a source of reduction of greenery and trees in the city. It is causing problem of poor sanitation system and quality of drinking water. Pollution is another outcome of haphazard and unplanned urbanization. The researcher also found that due to migration from rural to urban areas, the life in the city implicates adversely the quality of life. This study provides better insight on the problems of urbanization in urban areas and will also help policy makers to focus on major areas of improvement such as to check the migration from rural to urban. To enforce the urban laws to reduce the problems of sanitation, check on transport system, quality of drinking water, domestic and industrial waste. The researcher suggests the monitoring of the migration from rural to urban areas through provision of basic facilities in rural areas. On the other hand awareness campaigns and provision of basic facilities to the rural people (educational facilities, health facilities, food and empowerment in basic decision making) can reduce this problem.

From Usages of Merchants to Default Rules: Practices of Trade, Ius Commune and Urban Law in Early Modern Antwerp

In sixteenth-century Antwerp, commercial contracts were supported with refined government-made rules that brought techniques, usages and customs practised by merchants to the level of sophisticated law. Because no body of unwritten substantive law on commerce existed and because commercial practices were often too rudimentary from a legal perspective, in the 1500s detailed and balanced normative precepts on contracts of trade came to be crafted. When in the first decades of the sixteenth century more and more foreign merchants visited Antwerp, its rulers gradually started supplementing and upgrading practices of merchants to default rules regarding contracts, with materials and concepts drawn from the ius commune. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the use of civil law not only further determined the contents of the default rules that were imposed by the Antwerp aldermen, but it also lay at the basis of a change in the latter's policy of establishing precepts of urban law. After 1550, the philosophy of rationality and exhaustiveness found within civil law writings, the appreciation of which was triggered by political and economic factors, was reflected in wide-ranging collections of Antwerp law that covered many legal questions regarding commercial arrangements.

Derecho urbanístico y desarrollo territorial colombiano. Evolución desde la Colonia hasta nuestros días

This article shows, chronologically, the evolution of the Colombian Urban Law, from the Spanish legislation uttered during the Colony to our days. The main purpose of the article is to study the different institutions that originated the current urban laws, from the Statue of Felipe II, to the current Law 388 of 1997, including the Civil Code regulations and its amendments, the causes that led to the Law 9 of 1989 (also known as the Urban Reform Law), as well as the regulations derived from the latter and the 1991 Constitution.

A New Framework of Urban and Rural Planning System in Guangdong

As the "Urban and Rural Planning Law " had been promulgated in 2008, the paper studied the context of socio-economic development and the actual situation of urban and rural development in Guangdong Province, drawing on the experience of the British planning system, proposing the framework of urban and rural planning system as "Provincial Spatial Plan" and "Local Development Plan", which including urban system planning, master plan, detailed plan, village plan four types. The new framework will streamline the planning system, reduce the levels of planning and clear the relationship between different types of planning, contributing to regional coordination in urban and rural areas.

도시․주거환경정비사업의 공공관리제도 개선방안 연구

Although the housing demand increased in downtown, the housing site for housing building were insufficiency, Because of this situation, the necessity of the Urban and Residential Environment Projects is increasing. The Urban and Residential Environment Projects consist of three-stage (Planning stage, Implementation stage, Completion & Finishing stage), For successful projects, cooperation activity among Government, local government, promoter, house owner, construction enterprise is needed, However, the cooperation among stakeholder was not seen in the Urban and Residential Environment Projects. The obstacle in project process appeared. Typically, the obstacle are non-professionalism of project participants, undemocratic project operation, conflict among stakeholder, frequent revise the law, delayed project, increasing of project cost and social cost. To solve the problem, Government revised ``the Urban and Residential Environment Maintenance Law`` April, 2010. Seoul enforced this law for the first time July, 2010. This is a study for apprehending background, purpose, outline, main contents of the Public Management System and trying to find a way to launch a successful improvement project with an analysis figuring out the negative factors. From the analysis, we have found that the opinion about the Public Management System was negative, that the Public Management System infringed on the right of autonomy for the union member, and that a fund aid was lack, and that a intervention of government caused project delay. In a field of the projects, the Urban and Residential Environment Projects couldn`t seek a solution to the move plan and removal of tenants, conflict between the union member and a committee for emergency countermeasure, cost-sharing for infrastructure, high burn charge of the poor. Measures to financing, a resolution on the construction company, cost-sharing estimating program are especially urgently needed. These negative assessment of the Urban and Residential Environment Projects in the existent circumstances were caused by a half-baked system test, excessive intervention of government, to solve these problem, government must implement the pilot projects. Through plenty of pilot projects, the probable negative results decreased. A finished system can reduce confusion and side effects in a field of the projects.

Jerusalem: One planning system, two urban realities

Participation in the production of space and using it is one of the important aspects of the Right to the City to which a city's inhabitants are entitled. This article discusses how the Israeli urban planning system and law contribute to the production of space in the divided city of Jerusalem, how they are systematically institutionalized to realize ideological and geopolitical aims of the national level of the state, on the administrative bureaucratic level of the system, while ignoring the different spatial and urban realities of the city's two ethno-national groups; Israelis and Palestinians. This effectively produces different outcomes for the different ethno-national groups inhabiting the city; it facilitates the existence and growth of one group and limits that of the other ensuring the Right to the City of Israeli Jews, while depriving the Palestinians, to an extreme degree, from their Right to the City in Jerusalem.

Military doctrine and intelligence fusion in the American homeland

Although a plethora of research has examined US efforts to combat terrorism both at home and abroad, very few scholars have investigated the unprecedented relationships among US national security institutions and urban law enforcement agencies that have emerged since the events of 9/11. Through evidence culled from semi-structured interviews with 28 security planners in Washington DC and New York City, this article explains how path dependence, isomorphism and diffusion are propagating the application of military doctrine within domestic security initiatives through ‘intelligence fusion’. With particular attention to the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, this investigation builds upon a body of work that has emerged in recent years by charting the institutional and technological architectures that are driving the deployment of paramilitary tactics and surveillance systems in cities.