Introduction

Urban Governance and Legality from Below

Across the globe the governance of human populations continues to undergo dramatic change. In liberal democracies, the now familiar story is of responsibility migrating away from centralized federal bureaucracies under relatively direct political control, toward myriad local private and hybrid agencies that are neither obviously public nor private. Through new strategies, forms of knowledge, and the dominant language of community, these authorities have emerged to supplement and even replace the traditional state provision of services. These new arrangements of rule entail introduction of a variety of mechanisms provided through enabling legislative reforms that create more distance between the decisions of federal political authorities and those of the citizenry. Governmentality studies and related socio-legal scholarship have documented these complex shifts within and across national jurisdictions to a considerable degree. This broad set of changes is referred to as an ascendant “advanced liberalism” or “post-Keynesianism” in governmentality circles but is also more broadly termed “neo-liberalism”. Yet, missing in these voluminous accounts of change is acknowledgement of less obvious and often heretofore nameless forms of governance and legality, those forms operating in civil society, on its boundaries, and in obscure corridors of the lowest levels of state bureaucracies. What we call “governing from below” is an orienting concept that seeks to shed light on these forms, and their corresponding agents, rationalities, and knowledges that can become enrolled in the new arrangements of rule, but which tend to be neglected due to a widely perceived banal, immoral or even criminal character.

The urban is a key locus of transition to neo-liberalism and a clear lens through which to view governing “from below” and its tensions and articulations with governing “from above”. Neo-liberal forms of urban governance are often manifest within broader, ambitious efforts to revitalize urban economies decimated by economic globalization, with an aim of creating more secure and privately controlled urban spaces of consumption and residential living and ever more active urban consumers and citizens. But the agents of governance “from below” and their strategies tend to be overlooked or dismissed as integral facets of how this new urban governance works and—sometimes—fails to work. Also neglected are related types of legality that amass in the urban, most notably as city by-laws and ordinances, but also as more mundane private codes and commonplace sets of rules targeting conduct in vital and strategic urban spaces. Such legality is significant since it may well prompt or be a strategic means of avoiding governance “from above”. Forms of governance and legality “from below” can at some level befit and blur with neo-liberal urbanism, but also can be distinct and in tension, thus drawing attention to the local politics of urban governance which require empirically grounded but perhaps less discursively-focused study than is typically found in governmentality and related socio-legal studies.

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society focuses on forms and features of contemporary urban governance, legality, and security provision as governance “from below” and their relations with governance “from above”. Assembled is an international cast of scholars who address central theoretical or methodological issues via research on urban contexts in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Three articles focus more or less directly on security provision and crime control, programs that are on the frontlines of rearrangements of rule in cities and sometimes serve as the very channel for change to flow. The other two articles explore the governance of spaces and forms of conduct—pedestrian flow and prostitution—just as closely associated with the urban. The agents of governance “from below” uncovered in these five articles range from organized criminal networks, to moralized downtown bar owners, to low-ranking city bureaucrats, to outreach organizations serving women sex workers. While interpreting governance “from below” in differing ways, especially in relation to the state, together the articles effectively unearth the fruitfulness of attending to these neglected forms in seeking to understand the contemporary governance of urban spaces and city life.

In the opening article, “Non-state Governance ‘from below’: Towards a Critical Perspective,” Kevin Stenson...