IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

The paper investigates the relationship between law and architecture; the physical manifestation of legal decisions upon the fabric of the city and in turn, the impact of the built environment upon the rule of law. Moving from Law and Architecture to Law as Architecture, the paper examines the deep interrelationships between these seemingly distinct disciplines. It explores the city of London’s urban development from the middle of the 18th century in parallel with landmark legal cases that have gone beyond their own premise to a myriad of consequential impacts on the City’s material and immaterial forms of life. It does so by looking to London’s past; that is, the beginning of the ‘high modern’ period whose end was marked by the so-called, ‘financial revolution’ the big bang of the late 1980’s. The merging of a legal and spatial analysis of the city aims to reveal the frequent contradictions that exist and emerge between the physical and social principles, between the sequential and jussive orders, between the public and the private, the local and the global; and so between the city and the environment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the growth of the ‘autonomous country towns’ that sprang up in what we now call London’s West End. It is this model, the traces of which exist today, that offers a critical model for the post-Big Bang era. Avoiding the pitfalls of nostalgia as well as the nihilism of a ‘new beginning’, we argue that these ‘towns’ and their subsumption within the broader and expanding city brings together the praxis of contemporary thinking of cities in the global age and the potential for a more liveable and sustainable future