Participants of the Law, Urban Space, and Social Justice workshop in Onati, Spain.
OÑATI, JUNE 2013 | LAW, URBAN SPACE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE
Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law
The month of June began at the International Institute of Legal Sociology of Oñati with a new scientific seminar. concerning the relationship between law, urban space and social justice.
The workshop, entitled "Law, urban space and social justice ", was coordinated by Marius Pieterse and Thomas Coggin, both professors at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
As the world population grows and urbanizes space, size, shape and functionality of cities determines how individual rights are established and groups of people. Contestation, negotiation, and, inevitably, legal regulation shapes the potential of cities to offer sustainable social justice for its inhabitants. The need to ensure integration, respect for diversity and respect for civil, political and socio-economic human rights is crucial in the development of cities.
Interdisciplinary urban research should guarantee this need, and should analyze how the influence of law in life and the urban space, can in turn, develop social justice.
The 17 participants of this workshop, from Germany, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the United Kingdom and South Africa are members of the International Research Group on Law and Urban Space (IRGLUS), which has been inactive for some years. Between they find experts in the various branches of law, of urban planning, architecture and urban geography.
In the Old University of Oñati, the relationship between law, identity will be analyzed through individual and urban life, the impact of land and planning policies urbanism in the spatial transformation of the city, the controversies surrounding the legal regulation and the privatization of public space, the relationship between property private sector, property rights and public space, and the impact of legal regulation on freedom of expression and urban creativity.