The essays in this collection relate notions of space and representations of interior and exterior spaces to concerns for individual identity and autonomy as these are framed by practices of governance or codified by law. They examine the manner in which imaginative frameworks forming an environment for human action are objectified through practices aimed at governing relations between people or conversely,the way in which legal codes and statutes rely upon there being a relationship between individuals and their surroundings. The Geography of Law brings together research from a range of disciplines to question how urban spaces, works of architecture and landscape, and representations of socio-legal ideas in texts, city plans and paintings, engage with the construction of identity, character and values, both historically and the present day. Essayists question the usefulness of space and regulation as categories of critical analysis, scrutinize familiar uses of these categories and invent new ones. This motivation behind the collection is based on an assumption that space and law carry moral worth and elicit moral considerations however variable their value might be.
Contributors: Michael Austin (Professor of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Unitec, Auckland) Richard Blythe (Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture, University of Tasmania, He is also a founding partner of the Sydney/Hobart based architectural practice Terroir) Michael Levine (Professor in the Department of Philosophy, University of Western Australia, Perth) Peter Kuch (Professor in the School of English, University of New South Wales, Sydney) John Macarthur (Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography, Planning and Architecture, University of Queensland, Brisbane) Kristine Miller (Assistant Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis) Richard Mohr (Co-director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre and Head of Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong, Australia) George Pavlich (Professor of Sociology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton) William Taylor (Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, University of Western Australia, Perth)