Legal production and global imagination: urban cartographies through Law in Barcelona

Abstract

Public space analysis has been one of the most controversial issues in social and political research, mainly because of its ambiguity and polysemy or, at best, because it has been reduced to the study of state institutions. In urban fields there are many studies ―specially at the level of political economy― which make the link between changes in the public space of (or in) the city and global processes occurring at the economy level or, especially, over urban depictions in a global scale. Through a critical Geography of Law, this paper examines how concrete normative practices have contributed to the reshaping of the very term of public space in Barcelona in the last two decades. Specifically this article is set out to show how a geographical imagination which is based on “global, clean and civic” discursive features of Law takes shape.