Entering the lawscape – City of Justice in Italy

Introduction:

The city requires a spanning of matter and meaning, corporeality and abstraction, tangibility and inaccessibility, humanity and nonhumanity. The most prominent difficulty in defining the city is that, while the city is often considered to be constituted by signs, it continually distances itself from them. The city would be an
impossibility. It would always have to be considered as a spanning of a fissure, and in that sense, a precarious projection that tries to accommodate various opposing potentialities, both symbolic and material.

The city succumbs to the easy avenue of an anthropocentric phenomenological fusion between the symbolic and the observational. The concept of spatial justice takes the form of a question mark. It operates in an actual and symbolic space in everyday life and demands continuous assessment of where one positions oneself and why. I have previously defined the concept of spatial justice as the desire of an individual or collective body to occupy the same space at the same time as another body.

What is a city?:

Defining the city requires a spanning of matter and meaning, corporeality and abstraction, tangibility and inaccessibility, humanity and nonhumanity. The most prominent difficulty in defining the city is that, while the city is often considered to be constituted by signs, it continually distances itself from them. Nobody puts this better than Italo Calvino in his description of the city of Tamara:

“The entrance to the city is through streets full of signs coming out of the walls. The eye meets no things, but shapes of things that imply other things;…If a building has no signpost or figure on its walls, then its shape and position in the city plan are enough to reveal its function;…Even the merchandise the salesmen spread on their benches have a value, not in themselves but as signs of other things;…The stare runs through the streets as though they were written pages: the city dictates everything that you are supposed to think, it makes you repeat its own words, and while you think that you are actually visiting Tamara, you do nothing else but register the names with which the city defines itself and all its spaces.”

Entering the lawscape:

In order to be assisted in this endeavour, we need to root spatial justice in law. It is my argument that spatial justice emerges from within the lawscape, which we can define as the manifold of law and the city, the epistemological and ontological tautology between the law and the city. Law in the lawscape is not just the standard, written state law but also the diffused normativity that streams through everyday life – what Spinoza has called “rules for living”. This includes human and other bodies as well as objects. Just as a body, an object is already functionalized, normalized, never independent of its normative position in the world. At the same time, the object determines the functions and normalization processes around it – it generates its own zones as Timothy Morton writes, it emits its own spacetime in which we are all captive, fixed firmly to the spot.11 In that sense, human, natural, artificial bodies come together in creating and being created by the law.

An A-spatial Justice:

Spatial justice, both explicitly and implicitly, has been widely employed in the literature on concepts and practices of justice from a geographical perspective. Unfortunately, very few of the attempts have managed to offer anything to the discourse with regards to a radical spatial and corporeal understanding of the concept. Indeed, the majority have failed to distinguish spatial justice from such received and frequently co-opted concepts such as social and distributive justice, or regional democracy. Even in the origins of the concept, which can be traced back to David Harvey’s work on justice and space, spatiality becomes bifurcated in the “complex, non-homogeneous, perhaps discontinuous” social space on the one hand; and the physical space on the other, in which, as Harvey says, the engineer and the planner typically work.

Conclusion:

So who will final get the seat at the concert hall? When law plays games with itself, the question of spatial justice emerges. This is a moment where the law withdraws, unable to solve the issue within the particular spatial and temporal parameters. The negotiation is neither prescribed, nor easy. It is not a question of putting one body against another and letting them fight it out. Nor is it a question of simple temporal priority (‘I got here first’), although this might count. It is a question of creating a breathing space where spatial justice can emerge, where several corporeal movements can be tried out and where bodies might find themselves in need of withdrawal from recognised positions, security of choices or historical belongings. In those moments, the law will listen in and enable a decision. But for spatial justice to emerge, a different law should also have emerged.

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