Chris Adrian Butler

Critical Legal Studies and the Politics of Space

A growing body of work over the past two decades has been explicitly concerned with the interdisciplinary connections between law and questions of space. Traversing topics such as the regulation of the city, control of public space and the symbolic dimensions of spatial conflicts, this literature constitutes an important contribution to critical legal scholarship. However, there is still much work to be done on the development of the theoretical foundations of this field. This article will present the writings of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre as revealing a sophisticated theory of space with potentially profound implications for the research program of critical legal studies. Lefebvrean ideas are directly relevant to the renewal of critical approaches to the structure and form of planning law and regimes of urban governance. His work also contains fertile resources for research into the transformation of traditional forms of political citizenship into the broader concept of urban citizenship. Both these examples highlight the importance of the politics of space for critical legal thought and the role Lefebvre’s social theory may play in its future development.

Slicing Through Space: Mobility, Rhythm and the Abstraction of Modernist Transport Planning

Providing for the movement of people and things is an inevitable and increasingly important element of urban governance. Urban life in Australian cities has been physically structured around the private motor vehicle, and transport policies have historically focused on the public funding of large-scale public roadways. There is no better example of this approach to transport planning than in Southeast Queensland, where government departments associated with responsibilities for road infrastructure have traditionally wielded enormous power, and have repeatedly attempted to impose large-scale technological solutions for transport problems without regard for their wider impacts on urban life. Despite an emerging awareness of the need to reduce carbon emissions by establishing alternative models of urban mobility, local authorities in Brisbane have recently followed in this well- established tradition by embarking on an ambitious expansion of river crossings and underground road tunnels as a way to increase the capacity of private vehicular flows through the inner city. This article is an exploration of the philosophical framework ‘driving’ these political decisions and their inevitable imposition of new spatio-temporal laws on Brisbane’s inhabitants. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s account of the relationship between the production of space and social rhythms, it is argued that these transport planning decisions and the way they govern mobility will reproduce the destructive effects of abstraction on both space and the rhythms of the city.

Spaces of Justice : Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations

This book has its origins in a symposium we convened in December 2013 which aimed to explore the transdisciplinary possibilities of thinking about the spatial dimensions of justice. Oering a unique set of perspectives on the contours and interstices of law’s ‘spatial turn’, the essays collected here oer a series of ontological, historical, aesthetic, jurisprudential and political inquiries into just modes of inhabitance and the deeper conceptual connections between space, justice and juridical relations.