Ever more often, researchers and scholars endeavor to situate law in its social, political, historical and cultural contexts. At the same time, there is a need to invest law and the social sciences with new roles and resources. We thus propose to look for the many intersections of law, culture and the humanities by presenting four topical preoccupations: (1) interlegality in everyday life; (2) the synesthesia of law; (3) material socio-legal studies; and (4) interactive ecologies of knowledges and methodologies. This will constitute part one of the paper. Parts two and three will look at two particular and very recent interdisciplinary relationships: those between law and music and between law and food. We thus propose it would be appropriate to expose students, learners and practitioners of all kinds to the difference that an understanding of the links between law, culture and the humanities makes.
The aim of the paper is to examine new trends in the regulation of access to public space, looking at the legal implications of the adoption of hostile architecture and objects as a widespread tendency in urban design. The paper approaches the rising interest in hostile architecture and design with the aim to show the normative aspects of such a trend and how law contributes to shaping an urban space more prone to the insertion of hostile urban objects in it. I begin with a brief discussion of attempts to define and understanding hostile architecture through some examples and showing how the topic matters for legal and socio-legal studies. Then, drawing on examples from Italian legislation, I analyze how the link between “decorum” and hostile architecture shapes public spaces and how this helps to create a specific regime of visibility and expulsion for certain categories of people. Finally, I make some concluding remarks on how hostile design represents a challenge for re-thinking cities in more inclusive terms.
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