Invisible Laws, Visible Cities

The connection between law and the city is an increasingly topical area of interdisciplinary research, currently being explored from both applied and theoretical perspectives. This special issue confronts some of the assumed categories, priorities and instrumentalities of visibility with regard to law and the city. Our aim is to circulate materiality between law and urban space so that the material considerations can be both reinforced and dematerialised. The abstraction of urban space within law will be the projected outcome of a spatial turn of law, permitting a dematerialised urban space to materialise from within the supposedly objective, non-spatialised legal system. But this abstraction of materiality is only possible once the material has previously been encouraged to deploy its geography within the law. We hope that this piece of collective research will render both the spaces of the city and law visible to and within each other, while respecting their need for material invisibility.