I. Qualitative Research

To investigate the interaction between law and society, methodologies and methods are articulated through a research design. Empirical socio-legal researchers use both qualitative and quantitative methods to empirically test their theories and hypotheses. Qualitative socio-legal research is predominantly naturalistic, ethnographic, and/or participatory, looking for evidence of meaningmaking. Here, methodologies draw primarily from social science and humanities research, including, increasingly, anthropology. Many legal scholars would also argue that legal research, insofar as it draws on legislation, case law, and policy documents, is itself empirical, being concerned with observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic. Lisa Webley explains the connection, suggesting that “[m]any common law practitioners are unaware that they undertake qualitative empirical legal research on a regular basis—the casebased method of establishing the law through analysis of precedent is in fact a form of qualitative research using documents as source material.”^{Footnote 15}

We can use qualitative research, defined broadly to include doctrinal, comparative, and lawincontext approaches, to investigate cities encompassing the many, the diverse, and the outsiders. As Hendrik Hartog explained in Pigs and Positivism, customs, histories, people, buildings, sightlines, and even pigs can make up a city.Footnote ¹⁶ When an 1819 judgment prohibited the animals from running freely in the streets of New York, preferring judicial reasoning to established custom, this “creation of a modern bureaucracy, the transformation of relatively selfsufficient artisans and mechanics into a working class, and the growth of a commercial rural agriculture dedicated to feeding urban residents” combined to present a coherent articulation of nineteenth century urban modernity.Footnote ¹⁷ For Hartog, it enabled the city to be “derived imaginatively” from the judgment prohibiting the pigs.Footnote ¹⁸ Analyzing the judgment is a form of qualitative research, making meaning from the decision to better understand urban governance, reading decisions for both their ratio and for their absences, in this case the legal customs, everyday practices, and the perspectives of excluded participants, in this case, the pigs.

We must, as Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos explains, be careful of our vantage points and blind spots in urban law.^{Footnote 19} We all experience “the city” differently, not least due to race, gender, age, or additional needs with racism, gender vulnerability, and ableist infrastructures often built into the fabric of cities. One famous story concerns the decision by Robert Moses to design bridges on parkways running through Long Island to be too low to allow regular use by buses, thereby preventing the twothirds of New Yorkers who did not have access to a car from visiting the State’s beaches.Footnote ²⁰ In his biography of Moses, Robert Caro suggests that was a conscious decision, embedding political decisions in concrete rather than relying on legal restrictions:

In this New York context, anyone lacking access to a car could not rely on buses to use the roads. The rules permitting Moses to determine the height of bridges despite their discriminatory effect, provided a physical legacy still felt today, illustrating how rules can be built into the urban infrastructure itself. Pouring Moses’ decisionmaking into concrete made the prejudiced assumptions about who should leave the city to visit the beach both spatially difficult and expensive to alter. Similarly, the protection of statues of men involved in slavery or oppression by heritage bodies has caused huge pain and unhappiness to urban residents, prompting extralegal responses to administrative procedures of officials.Footnote ²² By recognizing these interrelationships, using qualitative research methods including close reading of texts, interviews, participant observations, and site visits, socio-legal scholars can investigate urban law as an ongoing dynamic activity—identifying how legal provisions, practices, customs, bridges, statues or pigs order the city.

II. Quantitative Research

Legal quantitative research does not differ significantly from quantitative research in other disciplines. Socio-legal scholars still design their projects, collect and code data, conduct analyses, and present results. The biggest difficulty in empirical legal research, as Andrew Epstein and Lee Martin suggest, is a lack of statistical understanding in their readership, communicating “complex statistical results to a community lacking in statistical training.”^{Footnote 23} As with qualitative research, quantitative analyses can be exploratory, explanatory, and/or descriptive. Socio-legal scholars can add to this sustained interrogation of categories, which is premised on legal definitions that underpin the data.

One area where legal definitions and quantitative assessments interact is in indicators, an increasingly hot topic in comparative law, with possible implications for urban law. An indicator has been defined as “a named collection of rankordered data that purports to represent the past or projected performance of different units.”^{Footnote 24} The critical aspect here is that the data are “generated through a process that simplifies raw data about a complex social phenomenon” and are, “in this simplified and processed form, … capable of being used to compare particular units of analysis (such as countries or institutions or corporations), synchronically or over time, and to evaluate their performance by reference to one or more standards.”^{Footnote 25}

Exploring the genealogy of indicators, investigating how individual criteria have developed, by whom and for what purpose, has led Sally Merry to identify their “seductive qualities.”^{Footnote 26} She raises the alarm, writing that indicators, “particularly those that rely on ranks or numbers, convey an aura of objective truth and facilitate comparisons” even while they “typically conceal their political and theoretical origins and underlying theories of social change and activism … [relying] on practices of measurement and counting that are them selves opaque.”^{Footnote 27} Scoring progress against indicators encourages partial compliance—and even cheating or changing definitions and assessments of whether compliance has been achieved.^{Footnote 28} Scholars are critical of how indicators function as a technology of governance, noting their “deep managerial roots,” with Amanda PerryKassaris’ video providing an excellent representation of how indicators narrow down the view—translating something into a definition to be counted, relying on a particular form of recognizability—which may not translate into all contexts and cultures.Footnote ²⁹ Indicators are both a form of knowledge production and a technique of governance, producing both co-option and resistance.^{Footnote 30}

And yet, despite all of these critiques, indicators are likely to continue in policy evaluations. They provide a method to attempt to achieve equivalence, critical to any form of comparative urban assessment. By understanding quantitative data analysis, the legal formulations that underpin categorizations, and the critiques of numeric reduction, socio-legal scholars can contribute to these debates, explaining how legal and numeric taxonomies interact at the urban scale.

III. Urban Law: A Grammar

As analysts, in any discipline, we need some way to make cities legally legible, we cannot see the city in its legal totality, at a scale of 1:1. This frustration was famously captured by Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares’ oneparagraph story, On Exactitude in Science, where the Guild of Cartographers “struck up a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.”^{Footnote 31} To map on a scale of 1:1, the cartographers had to create a map as big as the space they were mapping, and in their case, the Empire. To map the urban on a scale of 1:1, we would have to create a city.

This necessity for analytical reduction is not only a problem for lawyers. Algebraic equations make the world readable to scientists, modern economics rests on a central tenet that profit and loss can be calculated—there are many mechanisms of legibility. If urban law aims to understand cities, then we need some mechanism of reduction, a form of intellectual infrastructure, to investigate how cities govern and are governed by people, places, reputations, and things. We cannot study the city in all its complexity.

So how do we reduce the city to be studied in urban law? One starting point is to attempt to identify the grammar of urban governance by identifying the key legal frameworks, the laws, cases, policy documents, practices, and legal cultures that govern cities—including local government arrangements, economic development, housing, transportation, public and community spaces, the community as a whole, criminal law and criminology, and infrastructure. We then use the socio-legal scholar’s toolkit: Theory, qualitative, quantitative, and/or doctrinal legal analysis to understand how cities are produced by, and produce, law. Socio-legal research investigates how law constitutes everyday social relations, in this case, in an urban setting. This includes a focus on administrative rationality, asking how a city sees as well as investigating how the city is produced, from the ground up.Footnote ³² Quantitative data sets, including indicators, might be useful here—noting their limitations—particularly when paired with legal analyses. Although undoubtedly costly, urban law research can draw on multiple methods, engaging reflexively to interrogate and strengthen initial theories, questions, and findings.^{Footnote 33}

The aim is to understand how cities are legally produced with an eye to identifying shared legal concepts, regulatory approaches and practices, as well as notable differences. We can adopt the insight, if not the full critique, of Jennifer Robinson, that most urban areas are “ordinary cities,” addressing similar problems—unaffordable housing, transport congestion, and air pollution—using analogous governance frameworks. Research has often prioritized capital and megacities—such as London, Paris, Shanghai, or New York—yet we need to study cities regardless of their size. An ordinary city approach avoids hierarchy, privileging the “megacities,” “global cities” or the metropolis over other cities and can help bridge geographical and epistemological divides, and broadens the number of cities understood as legal governance systems.Footnote ³⁴ As Belgian Geographer Nick Schuermans reviewing Robinson’s book notes, challenging the hierarchical production of urban theory:

To truly understand the urban everyday, we need to understand “ordinary” as well as “mega” or “global” cities—assessing both the differences and similarities between them, and producing legal legibility for analysis.

I. Urbanism

The first argument for urban law is perhaps the most compelling—urbanism is interesting. In 1973, New York urban lawyer Frank Grad suggested that then, in a period of urban decline, one contributing factor to the relative lack of urban law scholarship rested on “the many socalled urbanists who either hate the city or have given up on it.”^{Footnote 55} Today, cities and urban living are back in vogue, providing a growing focus for interdisciplinary research. Cities attract socio-legal scholars, the intellectual descendants of Ehrlich’s study of “living law,” keen to study urban rules and practices in urban sites that are still, to some extent, living laboratories—to use the language of 1930s Chicago sociology. Anthropological and sociological methodologies and methods, particularly ethnography, interviews, and observations, provide valuable ways for scholars interested in urban law to gather data to better understand the legal production of the city, even if at the moment much of this research is undertaken by scholars with their initial training outside of law.^{Footnote 56}

And so, despite the vibrant discourse of urban studies, legallyfocused scholarship is, with notable exceptions, mostly absent.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nonetheless, lawyers have much to contribute here, asking about the significance of property, feeding into debates about urban land acquisition,^{Footnote 58} protest and free expression, policing and urban criminology, and cultural practices—complementing sociological focus not only on people in cities but also people in urban law and society.

Certainly, the ideal type of the European city, so influenced by Weber and his Die Stadt with its emphasis on urban associations, cannot provide a single template for urban law. Weber’s “PoliticoAdministrative concept of the City”^{Footnote 59} undoubtedly informs urban life in some countries but cannot encapsulate all cities in their entirety. In particular, as Weber himself noted, urbanism as a form of consciousness is distinct from its physical embodiment. Contrasting these as the cité and the ville, Richard Sennett identifies the cité as representing “the character of life in a neighborhood,” its anthropology and a “kind of consciousness,” while ville encompasses the built environment—both buildings and “the product of the maker’s will.”^{Footnote 60} These two conceptions can be bridged, Sennett argues, if the urbanist is a partner to the urbanite, being both critical and selfcritical.^{Footnote 61} Similarly, for urban lawyer and theorist Andreas PhilippopoulosMihalopoulos, there is far more to cities than built environment alone, remaining in pursuit of careful critical analysis which produces “the ideal conversion from urbs to civitas.”^{Footnote 62} Fordham’s Nestor Davidson and Nisha Mistry also point to the broader possibilities for urban law, borrowing from Jan Gehl’s 1973 Life Between Buildings, to call for “Law Between Buildings,” providing a careful investigation of cities beyond their physical form.^{Footnote 63} With participatory governance a conventional way to understand the cité, and planning, building and infrastructure regulations conventional ways to understand the ville, urban lawyers can bring their appreciation for how these regimes interact, by producing, for example, opportunities for local residents to object to contentious development applications, even if they are not always heard.

Urban studies can also be enriched through analysis of repeated techniques used in urban law, fitting into modern debates framed as “planetary urbanism”, drawing on the broader question about what is distinctive about “the urban”, whether there is an “outside” to urbanity.Footnote ⁶⁴ This line of scholarship, developed by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, builds on Henri Lefebvre’s argument from the 1960s that, given the extension of networks both human, technological and financial, we are, in effect, “all urban now”.Footnote ⁶⁵ These arguments are highly theorized and polarized, highlighting urbanization as a process, prioritizing dynamics in terms of explanatory power, preferring to understand “urban” as a verb rather than as a noun.Footnote ⁶⁶ Theories of planetary urbanism have been criticized for “occluding” central aspects of urban studies, including difference, centrality, and the everyday, as well as privileging particular epistemologies.^{Footnote 67} Arguing for progressive urban change, Clive Barnett and Susan Parnell have noted that while planetary urbanism provides space for aspects of Southern urban realities, it does not provide much assistance in thinking concretely about how local city governments can find opportunities about how citybased actors can be supported “to expand their influence and agency relative to national and international actors such as firms, political parties or governments.”Footnote ⁶⁸

And yet while there may be limits to the planetary urbanism thesis, the focus on repetition within debates on planetary urbanism provides space for lawyers to demonstrate how repeated practices—sometimes by global commercial players using familiar techniques of property management and urban renewal—can replicate across jurisdictions.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance, Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing, Raquel Rolnik argues that the financialization of housing since 2008 has been disastrous for many left homeless and dispossessed.Footnote ⁷⁰ Rolnik points to familiar legal techniques, often resting on property commodification, including home ownership, subprime mortgages, and the right to buy, arguing that these legally facilitated transactions enable global urban wealth to be concentrated disproportionately in the hands of a few. Many cities have been affected by the same legal techniques, conceptually similar, if tweaked by jurisdiction.

Similarly, repeated practices have characterized urban retail development. Legal and spatial enclosures of previously public spaces, “malls without walls,” are often based on repeated prototypes, particularly using long leases from public authorities to private developers for 250 years—whilst maintaining on websites or public documents that the city still owns the land, which of course it does in terms of the freehold estate, though this is a longpostponed interest in reversion. The standard pattern is to masterplan a neglected urban area, using public powers of compulsory purchase and highway adaptation to subdue unruly landscapes into economically productive sites of consumption, governed by standard leases networks of experience.^{Footnote 71}

Transportation is also subject to repeated moves, including the designation of express or motorways, governed often at a national or regional scale, used by individual and corporate drivers.^{Footnote 72} Automobility is a cultural, economic, and political practice, which, all around the world is “the predominant global form of ‘quasi-private’ mobility that subordinates other mobilities of walking, cycling, travelling by rail and so on, and reorganizes how people negotiate the opportunities for, and constraints upon, work, family life, childhood, leisure and pleasure.”^{Footnote 73} Observing these repeated patterns and practices provides legal scholars opportunities to investigate transfers of both progressive and regressive urban practices. More fundamentally, by exposing the legal basis for these practices, urban lawyers can ask whether these repetitions are urban in their conception or in their effect. Urban lawyers have real scope to contribute to broader debates on whether “the urban” is a place or a process, engaging with debates in “planetary urbanism” or “planetary gentrification” explaining how we can often see the same techniques used again and again. It is in picking up these repeated legal forms—as well as noting progressive good practice or cultural distinctions—that urban law can develop in its own right as well as contributing to comparative legal development and urban studies.

II. Law in Service of Urban Quality

The United Nations couch their call for policy engagement by extrapolating from current trends, in that “the future will be urban for a majority of people, the solutions to some of the greatest issues facing humans—poverty, climate change, healthcare, education—must be found in city life.”^{Footnote 74} The city provides a test case for policy questions, while “sustainable urbanism” becomes a policy rubric to address shared problems of infrastructure, housing, economic development, and environmental adequacy. This is a pragmatic—if sometimes contested— strategy. For while sustainable development has long been understood as a contested subject, modern formulations, beginning with the Millennium Goals, have reduced complexity—compared to Agenda 21’s 351 pages—fitting objectives onto a single page, using simplicity to raise public awareness, facilitating mobilization, advocacy, and continuity.^{Footnote 75}

Law and legal practice are clearly relevant to this progressive task. The “New Urban Agenda” was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito, Ecuador in 2016 and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly later that year.Footnote ⁷⁶ It presents a “shared vision,” promoting the agenda as “a powerful tool for sustainable development for both developing and developed countries.”^{Footnote 77} The Agenda incorporates the newly developed Sustainable Development Goal 11, which proclaims that we should make “cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Such policy activity is increasingly coupled with rising interest in behavioral economics or “nudge theory” in policy and decisionmaking circles, encouraging scholars to contribute understanding of “the human dimension” in more accessible forms.^{Footnote 79} Any legal contributions come, of course, with an acknowledgement of disciplinary normativity, explicitly acknowledging urban aims to build better, cleaner, and more equitable cities. It requires urban law scholars explicitly to lay bare their intellectual foundations, which is an unfamiliar scholarly move.

Socio-legal studies are primarily concerned with the “how,” investigating the ways in which law and society, people and rules, customs and practices, objects and places, interact and interrelate. Of course, it will always be critically important to separate the research from policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, urban law has potential not only to understand the “how” but also to inform the “how to.” Socio-legal studies have seen increasing numbers of selfidentified “scholar activists” at a time where politicians have sometimes claimed that “people have had enough of experts” or where identifying a point as “academic” consigns it to the sidelines of debate.Footnote ⁸⁰ M. V. Lee Badgett, writing in The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change the World, calls on scholars to engage with problems of climate change, social and economic inequality, war, violence, threats to democracy, and infrastructure meltdowns. He argues that while “it’s tempting to keep our heads in books and computers, hoping that our students and published ideas will trickle down from the ivory tower into the world to make a difference,” this rarely happens.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, Badgett believes that “giving into this temptation would be a lost opportunity and an abdication of our social responsibility.”^{Footnote 82} Martin Partington agrees, particularly given the growing preference for “evidencebased” policymaking, noting drily that evidencebased policymaking is always “likely to be better than policymaking shaped by anecdote or personal preference.”^{Footnote 83}

Of course, taking a normative position, being “pro-urban,” is not a neutral step. It is important to be explicit about it, separating “research” from “policy implementation” to the greatest extent possible. Given socio-legal academics’ substantial—if sometimes imperfect—academic freedom all research starts from a subjective viewpoint. It is increasingly important to acknowledge researcher positionality within socio-legal studies. Urban law is no different in this respect.

In the absence of formal treaties or legislation focusing on urban law, charters and indicators provide one way to engage in detailed legal scrutiny of explicitly prourban agendas, using wellestablished doctrinal skills. The 1996 Habitat II Charter, agreed to in Istanbul, had already called for legal implementation of urban objectives, including through “national laws and development priorities, programs and policies,” as “the sovereign right and responsibility of each State in conformity with all human rights and fundamental freedoms […] to achieve the objectives of adequate shelter for all and sustainable human settlements development.”^{Footnote 84} Such definitions provide lawyers with opportunities to track language and meanings, noting how rhetorically attractive declarations can shift objectives over time.

In housing, Habitat II already emphasized the importance of legal rights to security of tenure in 1996 when it called for states to provide “legal security of tenure and equal access to land to all people, including women and those living in poverty.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, by 2016, the Habitat III Quito Declaration on Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements for All, security of tenure, such a key legal concept, was only to be “promoted”.Footnote ⁸⁶ Paragraph 13, rather than confirming the significance of secure tenure, “envisage[s] cities and human settlements that: Fulfil their social function, including the social and ecological function of land, with a view to progressively achieving the full realization of the right to adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, without discrimination.”^{Footnote 87} The understanding of hard and soft law, policy, and the limits of rights legislation by lawyers, is critical to understand what States have signed up to.

Such linguistic and legal limits to international declarations have long been understood. Their limitations provide one reason why modern global urban policymaking has turned to targets and indices to encourage progress. Sustainable Development Goal 11 “to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” has been crafted in ostensibly quantitative form, with four priority targets and accompanying indices.^{Footnote 88} The four targets are to: (i) Improve housing and upgrade slums; (ii) reduce harm to people and economic losses from disasters; (iii) reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, particularly from air quality and waste management; and (iv) substantially increase the number of cities and human settlements adopting and implementing integrated policies and plans.Footnote ⁸⁹ The SDG housing target 11.1 assesses whether States can “[b]y 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums,” with an indicator measuring the “proportion of urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing.”^{Footnote 90}

As Sally Merry et al. have explained in their explorations of the genealogies of indicators, categorizations are deductive, raising democratic questions of who assesses, what is measured, and why.^{Footnote 91} One task for legal scholars is to engage with the definitions that underpin these targets and indicators in meaningful ways. Clearly, definitions of a “slum” or a “plan” can vary considerably^{Footnote 92} so that even if slums and plans can be counted, they may not all be equivalents, with the potential that some quite shocking urban housing conditions could be ignored. A definition of a “slum” matters, particularly when listing the proportion of a country’s urban population living in slums^{Footnote 93}: any number is not absolute, instead it provides a perspective of what a “slum” is and how it can be counted. Theoretical and political objections remain to using reductive quantified assessments of this type that may miss important lived realities, while data tables and visualizations are only as reliable as the information entered into the software. Focusing on SDG 11, and indicator 11.1 specifically, the United Nations itself acknowledges the difficulties in differentiating between slum and nonslum areas, suggesting that, “methodologically, such an approach would start with innovative digitalbased satellite imagery analysis, coupled with community groundtruthing and local observation, and participatory slum mapping.”^{Footnote 94}

Ultimately, lawyers can make their own decisions as to whether or not to engage with these debates. Sally Merry has encouraged scholars to think about how to make indicators better, avoiding the overgeneralization, overhomogenization, and lack of context that so often limit the development and application of indicators.^{Footnote 95} Arguing that numbers can give us important knowledge, she exhorts policymakers to get more complicated and nuanced information into the process, particularly by drawing on categories of knowledge and information from the people themselves.Footnote ⁹⁶ Socio-legal research is particularly wellsuited to contributing to this task, drawing both on understanding of legal and official policy formulations as well as conducting empirical investigations into everyday meanings and understandings of key terms.

We should, then, be sensitive to the limits of quantitative analysis, slow to suggest that a particular legal framework can definitively improve a given variable, be that economic growth or urban quality. Some legal concepts have already indicated their potential in urban law. The best known, perhaps, is the “right to the city,” formulated both in political geography and in legal form, primarily rhetorical but sometimes also a legal right.^{Footnote 97} Activists and scholars have used the concept of a right to formulate a deontological response to problems of urban insecurity as well as challenging growing private control of public functions and spaces. Similarly, the legal concept of security of tenure is understood to promote housing safety, linked to wellbeing at the neighborhood scale.^{Footnote 98} One question here is whether equivalent—and this is the key test—framings of security of tenure can reduce populations living in urban housing insecurity. A German lease differs significantly from an English lease in terms of renter protection, yet security of tenure can be achieved in both with sufficient political will.Footnote ⁹⁹ Rights and security of tenure are recurring legal concepts often producing, both in their observance or nonobservance, how a city feels. Does it have high levels of civic engagement and political participation? Are there many people living on the streets or in inadequate housing? Urban studies do not conventionally study the work done by legal concepts even though, as Raquel Rolnik reminds us, there is remarkable repetition in cities all over the world.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

III. Governance Concepts

A third, more conceptual justification for urban law is that cities provide spaces to work out ongoing puzzles. These include the interaction of territory, sovereignty, and jurisdiction at a manageable legal scale. This is useful for internallyfacing legal studies, but also for engaging with related social science and arts disciplines where legal frameworks are often disregarded in favor of more theoretical or conceptual frameworks of governance.

There is clearly scope for synthesis in qualitative work on urban decisionmaking studying the processes through which government is organized and delivered in urban areas as well as the relationships between state agencies and civil society. Questions of democratic representation, power, and decisionmaking have been longstanding issues of interest, with classic American studies, for example, producing discordant results. For while Hunter Floyd identified a small, interlocking elite as governing 1950s Atlanta, Robert Dahl rejected such “sovereignties,” finding instead a pluralist model of community power in 1980s New Haven.^{Footnote 101} Urban governance scholars aim to understand the interaction of public, private, and community participants, all of which happens within a legal framework, and usually, structures of democratic participatory involvement, which may—of course—be more or less ignored depending on the type of decision being made.

Recent urban research indicates, however, that there is more interaction between the legal and governance worlds than might at first be supposed. In their study of “seeing like an investor” in London, Mike Raco et al. conclude that complex imaginations of planning and regulation have led to many firms realizing that “market success results from becoming more deeply embedded in the local political, social, and regulatory environments in which they are investing.”^{Footnote 102} This finding echoes studies of decentered governance where lawyers and political scientists are reaching largely compatible conclusions, including the Foucauldian insight that power and control are disposed amongst social actors and the state, a finding which has been particularly significant in studies of “street level bureaucrats.”^{Footnote 103} For as socio-legal scholars know well, regulatory decisions are dynamic, both in their drafting and in their enforcement, with processes sometimes informing the look, feel, or smell of a city as much as planned decisions.

Municipal budgets provide yet another relatively understudied aspect of law, despite their undoubted effects on urban areas.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Cities may have the broadest jurisdictions and range of powers, but if they lack allocated funds or cannot directly tax their residents, they are limited in what they can achieve. In a call to update studies of public law in the 1980s, Terence Daintith identified “imperium” and “dominium” as mechanisms of governance.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For Daintith, imperium represents a legislative expression of government deployment of force—or the threat of force—and respect for rules, while dominium describes policy instruments that involve the deployment of wealth by government. The two interact, particularly after periods of budget reductions.^{Footnote 106} While localism initiatives can bring much vaunted freedom for local authorities to set their own imperium regulatory priorities, the ability to enact urban rules reduces when coffers are bare.

Money matters enormously to legal studies of urban governance. With financial austerity so devastating in many cities, these concepts prove useful in understanding decisions between mandatory and discretionary funding choices. This governance distinction is often blurred in practice as Mia Gray and Anna Barford explain in their study of urban child welfare.^{Footnote 107} For while protection for “at risk” children is mandatory, the funding of youth centers is discretionary, with many vulnerable children relying on youth centers for socializing and networks of support.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Understanding the interrelationship between funding and administrative rationality is critical to understanding the practice of urban law and governance.

The urban context also provides space for legal scholars to continue to study ongoing questions of networks, jurisdiction, scale, territory, and sovereignty. So far, these questions have primarily emerged in studies of international law and settler colonialism, with notable exceptions only in municipal law.^{Footnote 109} Territory, in particular, is understood as a politicogeographic concept, as well as a process, whose relevance to administrative law is not yet well understood.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Sometimes, jurisdiction is understood as having fixed geographic boundaries. However, lawyers know well that jurisdiction can be contested and does not necessarily stop at national boundaries.Footnote ¹¹¹ There are also tensions between globalization and territory, which the city, particularly with an understanding of both repeated public and private practices, as well as networks and infrastructures, can help us to interrogate.Footnote ¹¹² Lastly, urban law continues to provide a rewarding context in which to investigate legal pluralism in both formal and informal settings.^{Footnote 113} Cities provide a “bottom up” way to investigate territory, networks, and jurisdictional scaling in one place, developing a new scholarly setting for legal studies.