Introduction: Searching for law, finding the city

Together, law and the city create a framework of interactions – a framework which is both intricate and invisible at the same time. When walking the streets of our cities, how many of us think consciously about the processes which regulate it, from the name of the street we are living on, to the status of a historic building at a nearby square, to the heavily regulated inner-workings of a nearby day-care, to the uniform of the local policeman…?

We may be excused, however, in this blissful ignorance of our daily lives – the many intersections of law and the city tend to escape broader analysis on the part of the legal academia (with a notable exception of the seminal work under Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos1), with researchers usually focusing on an analysis of a legal particularity, only by chance stumbling upon the city – and often failing to properly engage with it even then.