I received the following CALL FOR
PAPERS recently for the International Journal of Law in the Built Environment (IJLBE)
By this CFP we, as guest editors for
this themed issue, invite submission of high quality papers written by legal
scholars, urbanists, geographers and social scientists that explore law’s place
amidst the spatiality and materiality of the built environment.
Our aim is to
gather a collection of papers which can bridge
the 'critical' and 'embodied' practical aspects of making and managing built
environments. We seek to do this by setting critical legal geography
perspectives alongside practice oriented built environment legal scholarship,
in order to explore potential synergies and creative tensions that may arise
from this juxtaposition:
In keeping with
IJLBE’s broad remit, papers can be empirical, doctrinal and/or theoretically
based and can explore the themes suited to this CFP in any jurisdiction around
the world (please note that submissions must be written in English).
We are seeking
articles which engage the ways in which law is at work in the built environment
and do not wish to be overly prescriptive. But, indicatively, questions that
submitted papers might address include:
- How does law
contribute to the making and controlling of the built environment at multiple
scales?: ranging perhaps from the micro-world of design standards for building
components upward and outward through law’s shaping influence over rooms,
floors, buildings, terraces, wards, boroughs, cities, regions, nationalities
and globally.
- What is law’s
relationship with space, place and physical structures in the built environment
– and in particular how are objects framed by law (for example by how objects
of concern are defined in built environment regulatory laws; or in judicial
attempts to develop a ‘complex structure theory’ as a way of conceptualising –
and litigating – building defects)?
- How can legal
processes of built environment place making be critiqued through the lenses of
critical geography and progressive urbanism? And in doing so, what are the
implications for built environment scholarship and its concern with
professional practice?
- What are the dangers
of conflating law and geography? What methodological problems will be
encountered? What claims to knowledge and validity can such hybrid analysis of law
and geography claim?
- What role do
judicial and other spatio-material imaginaries (images of place and things)
play in the adjudication of cases concerning contested land use and/or the
conduct of processes that have as their aim the legally shaped ordering of
space and/or physical things
It is perhaps at the situated scale of
site level action that legal geography comes closest to scholarship concerned
with the professional practice aspects of the built environment and its law. It
is in this field (as this journal reflects) that the law is encountered
as a managerialist tool, it is concerned with ways of ordering and managing the
design, construction, ownership, use and removal of places, their physical
structures and also of their human inhabitants. Here applicable laws seek to
frame these material things in order to know and thereby control them - and
their actions - across time and space. Law in the built environment thus has at
its heart a practical concern with the governability of things.
Perhaps a fusion of legal geography and
built environment legal scholarship can open up insightful routes to the
understanding, refinement and critique of the processes by which law is
translated (Latour 2005) into buildings, streets and the urban landscape.
How to submit a
paper
The deadline
for submission of papers for consideration is 23 January 2014. Papers
should be submitted via the publisher’s on-line submission point: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ijlbe.
Full details of
the Journal’s instructions to authors regarding words limits, citation, layout
and writing style are available here. A full version of our CFP can be
accessed here.
Luke Bennett,
Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University
(l.e.bennett@shu.ac.uk); Professor Antonia Layard,
Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham (a.layard@bham.ac.uk)
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