Privatization of Law Enforcement

The year 2020 ushered in growing calls to defund the police. In Canada, as in other countries where the movement to defund the police has gained momentum, activists demand transferring money from police departments to social workers, reducing the number of police officers, and increasing police departments’ democratic accountability. This last group of reform initiatives is, perhaps, the least controversial one because it calls for improving the familiar structures of democratic oversight over police departments, such as municipal councils, independent police oversight boards and complaints bodies, and others. The demands for greater accountability of police departments to the public are a symptom of a deeper problem - there is a growing discrepancy between the goals of policing and the consequences of the police’s actions. This discrepancy materializes when the police’s attempts to ensure public safety result in the marginalization of racialized communities, particularly in larger cities across Canada. In order to understand why laudable policy goals lead to deeply problematic consequences, it is necessary to analyze the policing process in our cities. While it has traditionally been assumed that this process is left to the discretion of separate police departments, this paper demonstrates that externalities, such as data generated by private technologies, play an important role in undermining the goals of policing. Reliance on private data and technology does not absolve the police of accountability for resulting human rights violations. However, it has important implications for the reform of public oversight over the police. In an era when non-governmental actors are taking part in law enforcement through procurement contracts, democratic control over the exercise of the police’s contracting powers is an important, albeit often overlooked, instrument of police reform. Relying on contracts for predictive policing technologies as a case study, this paper argues that communities should condition the funding of police procurement on ex ante assessment procedures, technical specifications, and contract enforcement rights. Also, local elected representatives should have an opportunity to approve any data and technology sharing arrangements as well as federal standing offer arrangements that extend predictive policing to their communities.

Performing an Anti-Homeless City

In the time of globalization, many cities, including the city of Victoria in BC, have engaged in a development model fueled by investment, tourism, and economic immigration. This model requires public authorities to implement policies that contribute to making cities worthy of capital, tourists, and immigrants. Digital connectivity, real estate development, local amenities, and revitalized neighbourhoods are essential ingredients for economic development. In contrast, poverty and urban decay are not good for the way of life that politicians, entrepreneurs, tourists, and urbanites desire. Therefore, all visual manifestations of urban decay, including homelessness, should be restricted by law. In response to this development model, homeless people are forced to perform actions that are banned like building tent cities in parks. In doing so, homeless people challenge exclusionary legal and spatial orderings that support anti-homeless cities. This paper develops a performativity-based approach to legal geography to contribute to the debate about homelessness in Canada. Rather than focusing on the social right to housing, my argument in this paper zeroes in on the right to use urban space without being excluded. To this goal, I explore interactions between local authorities, homeless people, and other social actors in Victoria to explain that reiterated human interaction is the means to perform and rectify legal and spatial orderings that segregate homeless people. Thus, the performativity-based approach to legal geography developed throughout this paper illustrates not only how anti-homeless cities are socially performed, but also how they are collectively contested.

Understanding the Role of “the City” in Developing Complex Regulatory Frameworks

This paper considers the relationship between the legal regulation of haute couture in Europe and the importance of “the city” as the locus of complex cultural, legal, and geographical forces. Haute couture and its legal framework are used as a case study to investigate how local dynamics – in this case, focusing on the role of the city – can shape the national and international legal responses to a cultural phenomenon, as well as provide a more complete understanding of how culturally significant practices acquire such an enduring meaningfulness in society. Connecting the role of ‘the city’ and legal regulation is particularly interesting through the lens of haute couture because while cities are frequent hosts to artistic or cultural movements, haute couture resulted in an elaborate system of strict regulation that extends beyond the ordinary intellectual property toolbox. This framework has a broader function than national intellectual property law because it not only reflects the legal dynamic of a particular industry, but the cultural and artistic practices of a specific, and particularly localised in this case, city. Haute couture is a demonstration of the complex relationship between local, national, and international modalities of law-making. Haute couture emerged as a niche, city-specific, cultural development yet it resulted in a national framework of regulation that reinforced the centralisation of Paris in haute couture, building and further supporting localisation and sub-localisation in the context of the dense network of fashion houses, ateliers, and schools.

Implications of Urban Law on Urban Renewal Projects in the Historical Center of Lima

The Historic Center of Lima currently shows signs of urban deterioration as a result of the processes of exclusion and spatial segregation that have characterized the intense urban growth of the city of Lima. In the face of this urban deterioration, urban renewal processes are an instrument of transformation that acts as surgery for the recovery and reintegration of deteriorated central areas into the functioning of the current city. As a general, urban law regulates urban problems resulting from the transformation of urban lands, including the deterioration of central areas. In particular, actions in traditional central areas have regulations for the protection of cultural heritage. Therefore, the execution of the urban renewal process requires different regulatory instruments to plan and manage the renewal process, which defines its scope. In this sense, the present research has been proposed to address the implementation process of three urban renewal projects in collective housing located in the Historic Center of Lima; "Casa de las Columnas", the "Conjunto de Vivienda La Muralla" and the "Proyecto Piloto Martinete", to identify the effectiveness of the scope of the legal framework of urban renewal, as well as the procedures of intervention in historic centers and monumental areas. Focus on the analysis of the public administration's management, execution, and control activities in the land transformation process of deteriorated traditional urban areas. The article consists of the following parts. First, some conceptual considerations on urban renewal and its relationship with urban law are presented. The next section provides an overview of the state of the regulatory framework for urban renewal in Peru, which is key to contextualize the analysis of the case studies. The third part presents the study methodology and the limitations of the study. The fourth part presents the case studies and develops the scope of the legal framework of urban renewal in the case studies. Finally, some final reflections and conclusions are presented that establish the important elements that should be considered in the legal framework of urban renewal.

Judicial Interpretation in Resolving the Conflict on Jurisdiction between the Central Government and the Federating Units

The tension between the central government and the federating units has always been an intractable issue between the forces of centralization and decentralization in a federalism with the judiciary at the intersection of the conflict. Therefore, this study examines judicial interpretation in resolving the conflict on jurisdiction between the central government and the federating units. It applies Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, Richard Ford’s analysis of jurisdiction, Benjamin Cardozo’s and Oliver Wendell Holmes’s psychology of judging to judicial interpretation in resolving the conflict on jurisdiction between the central government and the federating units. It finds that the justices on the majority and the minority who interpret the constitution to resolve questions of jurisdiction between the central government and the federating units often play politics of space hidden within the interstices of legal rules without being conscious of their psychological biases. Hence, it argues that instead of playing politics of space, what the justices should do is to apply the principles in Keynesian federalism bolstered by the rule of presumption. With this, the influence of politics borne of psychological biases can be reduced while both the central government and the federating units are given equal chances. In conclusion, it recommends that whenever the judges are called upon to resolve the conflict between the central government and the federating units, the principle in Keynesian federalism with the rule of presumption should be applied.

Role of the Law in Achieving Sustainable Urban Development through Fiscal Incentives in Nigeria

As the Nigerian population increasingly becomes urban; the situation has had harmful societal, environmental, health and infrastructural effects on the urban centres. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the rate of land urbanisation in the country is moving at a slower pace; thereby placing pressure on the existing urban centres. Research conducted on urbanisation in Nigeria has revealed that the rate of urbanisation is unsustainable, serves as a constraint on economic development, and Nigeria’s cities are among the worst to live in. Data on the urbanization policies of various governments, globally, reveals that Nigeria is one of the few countries in the world without a clear urban policy. Meanwhile, Nigeria’s population continues to increase and is expected to have doubled by 2050. It is against this backdrop that this paper undertakes a multidisciplinary study of how the law’s adoption of fiscal incentives can help drive sustainable urban development in Nigeria. This paper argues that this will help the state governments in the decongestion of the existing urban centres (as the population urbanisation increases), ensure the creation of new urban centres, utilise fiscal incentives to attract businesses/ urban population to the new centres, and have sufficient fiscal revenues to sustainably manage the urban centres. This paper comparatively analyses the contribution of China’s legal system to its state-led land urbanization moving at a faster rate than its population urbanisation, thereby avoiding the ills associated with urbanization such as congestion, unemployment, etc. With China and Nigeria sharing a similar decentralized tax and fiscal system, state ownership of land, and a large population; this paper argues that the Chinese model can be adopted successfully in Nigeria.

The Tabooed City

The year 2009 shall remain a milestone year in the century as the year which witnessed the major shift of diaspora in urban centers of India for the first time in human history. In this context, it is essential to understand the socio-spatial negotiations happening and may happen ahead between the physically growing city and the everyday life, work-live relationship of these invisible communities within the city. Does the growing city with an economic disparity and tremendous polarization of amenities consider their criticality and social aspects which are deeply rooted within these communities, thriving in the vast and continually changing physical fabric?The planning framework of the cities are manifestations of a bigger play of byelaws and demonstration of power often blurs out the existence of inculcating the ‘excluded’ quarters of the city within a holistic whole. As a result, these quarters grow sporadically within the city creating a sense of anarchy. This paper tries to seek the relationship of state and political hegemony with these “excluded zones” where profit, political stability, and a constant saga of the failure of proposals to regenerate a highly diverse settlement within the financial capital of India. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai is a sprawling 525‐acre area with shanty roofs and deleterious sanitation conditions, housing over one million residents diversified in terms of its religious and ethnic matrix along with a wide gamut of informal occupations which makes it unique. Dharavi’s residents like most slum dwellers around the world, live in illegal housing units lacking basic amenities and suffer from social exclusion.The paper would critically investigate the failure of community engagement and mobilization attempts forming cooperatives, formation of the several schemes across three decades and failures of almost all policies raising questions of redevelopment, how costing and finance schemes were mostly inefficient at large.The paper would also try to understand the scale and scalability of various neo-liberal redevelopment processes initiated by political will, largely vested in the interest of capitalistic gains and focusing less on addressing the complexities and issues of the existing socio-economic conditions.

Making Data Visible in Public Space

“Transparency” is continually set as a core value for cities as they digitalize. Global initiatives and regulations claim that transparency will be key to making smart cities ethical. Unfortunately, how exactly to achieve a transparent city is quite opaque. Current regulations often only mandate that information be made accessible in the case of personal data collection. While such standards might encourage anonymization techniques, they do not enforce that publicly collected data be made publicly visible or an issue of public concern. This paper covers three main needs for data transparency in public space. The first, why data visibility is important, sets the stage for why transparency cannot solely be based on personal as opposed to anonymous data collection as well as what counts as making data transparent. The second concern, how to make data visible onsite, addresses the issue of how to create public space that communicates its sensing capabilities without overwhelming the public. The final section, what regulations are necessary for data visibility, argues that for a transparent public space government needs to step in to regulate contextual open data sharing, data registries, signage, and data literacy education.