Antonia Layard

Shopping in the Public Realm: A Law of Place

Through a case study based in Bristol, this article explores how the ‘law of place’ has transformed multiple heterogeneous city centre spaces into a single homogeneous and commodified privately owned retail site. Drawing on de Certeau, Lefebvre, and humanistic geographers including Tuan, the article explores how law facilitates spatial and temporal enclosure through conventional understandings of private property, relying on techniques of masterplanning, compulsory purchase, and stopping up highways. It suggests that the law of place draws on binary spatial and conceptual distinctions to apparently separate places from spaces, applying different legal rules either side of an often invisible boundary line. The article questions this legally facilitated spatial and conceptual enclosure, particularly as it restricts spatial practices within the public realm. It concludes by rejecting an urban ‘right to roam’ as insufficiently transformative, calling for a broader interpretation of Lefebvres ‘right to the city’ instead.

MapLocal: Use of Smartphones for Crowdsourced Planning

This paper discusses the development of a smartphone app, MapLocal, which seeks to empower residents to gather spatial data about their neighbourhood. Responding to the new Neighbourhood Planning powers offered within the Localism Act, 2011, a pilot scheme was undertaken with 50 participants across two neighbourhoods in Birmingham, UK. The app allows the crowdsourcing of knowledge from individuals to report on different characteristics of their neighbourhood and to undertake visioning exercises developing possible schemes to improve it. We argue that the app enables wider engagement with the early phases of a planning process, partially mitigating the post-political challenge to planning, which seeks to marginalize dissenting voices in order to promote the interests of the powerful.

The Europeanisation of contaminated land

New initiatives are underway at the Community level to impose liability for environmental damage. This article considers these developments, particularly their effect on contaminated land. It concludes that as the proposed Directive has significant limitations it will leave much contaminated land in the Community to be cleaned up under domestic provisions. This article also considers new developments on prevention, particularly through the European Commission Communication, Towards a thematic strategy for soil protection, issued in 2002 and the European Charter for the Protection and Sustainable Management of Soil. Again, however, the provisions in these documents are limited and do not as yet provide for consistent, precise levels of soil quality throughout the Community in the way that exists for other environmental media. Consequently, although the ‘europeanisation’ of the contaminated land regime is currently underway, the article concludes that current laws and policies have significant limitations. So far, at least, liability for contaminated land ex post and prevention ex ante are still issues predominantly regulated by Member States.

Locating community-led housing within neighbourhood plans as a response to England’s housing needs

Neighbourhood planning has revealed a real demand for connecting local planning with new ways of producing much-needed housing in England. Analysis of the first adopted neighbourhood plans illustrates the desire for connecting housing to local needs, providing affordable accommodation as well as housing for older people, young families and households with disabled residents. This paper explores the potential of linking neighbourhood planning and community housing development and suggests how such models can co-exist with contemporary housing markets.

A British perspective on land taxation: Politically unpopular

In dealing with scarce land, planners often need to interact with, and sometimes confront, property right-holders to address complex property rights situations. To reinforce their position in situations of rivalrous land uses, planners can strategically use and combine different policy instruments in addition to standard land use plans. Effectively steering spatial development requires a keen understanding of these instruments of land policy. This book not only presents how such instruments function, it additionally examines how public authorities strategically manage the scarcity of land, either increasing or decreasing it, to promote a more sparing use of resources. It presents 13 instruments of land policy in specific national contexts and discusses them from the perspectives of other countries. Through the use of concrete examples, the book reveals how instruments of land policy are used strategically in different policy contexts.

From Territorial to Environmental Cohesion

Despite being steeped in the language of sustainable development, current conceptions of territorial cohesion are broadly silent on the practice of environmental protection. This paper criticizes this omission, suggesting that environmental cohesion is an integral part of territorial cohesion, reflecting territorial cohesion’s concern with balance and co-ordination while drawing on the objectives of the environmental justice movement. We suggest that while environmental cohesion is not currently scheduled for addition to the three cohesion pillars, the importance of achieving environmental balance and equity can be characterised as part of territorial cohesion’s inchoate claim. Framing environmental cohesion as a concern throughout the territory of the EU, by placing it squarely within the remit of principles of territorial cohesion and solidarity, empowers individuals and communities as well as places. If through funding or delineation these spatial units are conceptualized as EU places then examples of best practice in one part of the region provides political and philosophical leverage to argue that standards should be the same throughout. The very idea of EU places is underpinned by understandings of cohesion and solidarity extending throughout the territory of the EU. Environmental cohesion can provide a means of comparing and improving environmental conditions between places.

Book Review: The Yearbook of European Environmental Law, Volume 3, the Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law — Property, Rights and NatureTHE YEARBOOK OF EUROPEAN ENVIRONMENTAL LAW, VOLUME 3SomsenH. (ed.) OUP, 2004, 1024pp. ISBN 0-19-925462-1, £135, hardbackThe Philosophical Foundations of Environmental Law – Property, Rights and NatureGoldsteinRobert Jay (ed.) Ashgate, 2005, 690 pp, ISBN 0 7546 2313 0, £130, hardback

This volume of the Yearbook of European Environmental Law is separated into sections consisting of articles (pp. 1–354); a survey of current substantive EC environmental law organised by subject (pp. 355–552); a consideration of recent developments in environmental law in individual member states (pp. 553–762); book reviews (pp. 763–822) and finally, summaries of a range of EC papers by Ludwig Krämer. The contributors to this volume emanate from across Europe and, as one might expect from the individuals involved, the sections on substantive environmental law within both the EC and individual Member States are undertaken with detailed professionalism. As such they provide a valuable resource for anyone interested in developments in both European environmental law and environmental law in Europe, all be it that the time taken from writing the original pieces, to their publication and then to this review renders that interest less than current.

Book Review: Foundations of Environmental Law and Policy: Interdisciplinary Readers in LawFOUNDATIONS OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND POLICY: INTERDISCIPLINARY READERS IN LAWReveszRichard L., Oxford University Press, 1997, 334 pp, ISBN 0195091523, £19.50

This is a teaching book. Its objective is ‘to introduce students to the major theoretical approaches in the field of environmental law and policy’ and it contains eight foundational chapters, including economic and non-economic perspectives, risk assessment, risk management and the choice of regulatory tools. These are supplemented by two case studies, the control of air pollution and liability for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites, and two sections on the international context, one on environmental regulation and international trade, the other on international environmental law. For a relatively short volume, priced at f19.50, it packs a lot in.