The Geography of Law. Landscape, Identity and Regulation

The essays in this collection relate notions of space and representations of interior and exterior spaces to concerns for individual identity and autonomy as these are framed by practices of governance or codified by law. These essays examine the manner in which imaginative frameworks forming an environment for human action are objectified through practices aimed at governing relations between people or conversely, the way in which legal codes and statutes rely upon there being a relationship between individuals and their surroundings. The Geography of Law brings together research from a range of disciplines to question how urban spaces, works of architecture and landscape, and representations of socio-legal ideas in texts, city plans, and paintings, engage with the construction of identity, character, and values, both historically and the present day. Essayists question the usefulness of space and regulation as categories of critical analysis, scrutinize familiar uses of these categories, and invent new ones. This motivation behind the collection is based on an assumption that space and law carry moral worth and elicit moral considerations however variable their value might be.

William Taylor teaches architectural design, history and theory in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia, Perth.