Law, Legal Struggles and Urban Regeneration: Rethinking the Relationships

The interrelationships between law, legal processes and urban regeneration have been little addressed by researchers of urban studies, while few have acknowledged the centrality of law as one of the core facets involved in the restructuring of the built environment. Rather, it has tended to be taken as 'given', as an underpinning of socio-institutional actions rather than being conceptualised as constitutive of them. In seeking to redress this imbalance, the paper considers the role of legal processes in urban regeneration through an exploration of the multiple and contested terrains of one of the core tools of urban regeneration, the compulsory purchase order (CPO). In exploring the interplay between urban renewal and CPOs, the paper begins by providing a brief overview and critique of the claimed value-neutrality of the Anglo-American tradition of law and legal processes, while outlining alternative ways of conceiving of the multiple interrelationships between law and socio-spatial processes. In a second section, we deploy case-study material to illustrate and discuss the socio-legal processes underpinning the CPO. We develop the argument, following Chouinard, that the legal discourses, practices and institutions of CPOs are powerful factors in perpetuating relations of social authority, power, exclusion and oppression.