Sociolegal Studies and Urban Governance: Mapping an Interdisciplinary Frontier

It was a pleasure to see the appreciative review of my book Governing From Below: Urban Regions and the Global Economy by Randy Lippert in this journal.¹ The project that culminated in this book began as a dissertation addressed mainly to the audience of sociolegal scholars.² The book itself remains largely focused on land use regulation and planning in eleven urban regions throughout France, Germany and the United States. In developing a framework to fit my findings, I ultimately settled on power and influence in urban governance rather than sociolegal studies as the main analytical focus. As Lippert recognized, elements from the law and society tradition still played an important role in the resulting synthesis. My ultimate choice was to integrate aspects of this tradition to the study of urban governance, rather than the reverse.

Lippert’s review is remarkably insightful and thoughtful, and shows a sophisticated understanding of this research and its findings. He also raises important and more general questions about the relation between urban governance and law and society. I agree with him that these two fields have a great deal to contribute to each other. Yet it is important to be explicit and self-conscious about their differences. Each brings distinct presuppositions, theoretical concerns and methodological presumptions to the analysis of similar subjects. I have ultimately found that analysis of urban governance offers a more compelling way to explain state-society relations at the local level than sociolegal studies have so far delivered. Yet sociolegal studies offer insights into the character of legal norms and the links between governance and society that can fill crucial gaps in the study of urban governance.

Two challenging points of criticism that Lippert raised in his review highlight major contrasts between the approaches of the political scientists and sociologists engaged in the study of urban governance and the presumptions of sociolegal studies. Each of these points has larger implications for integrating these two fields.

Lippert’s first critique concerns where to look for the content of bottom-up governance. He suggests that the sources of effective “bottom-up” governance may lie:

…‘farther down’ than Sellers acknowledges, that it flows upward from more subtle and less obvious places, beneath the formal texts and opinions espoused by the city elites and activists that he examined in detail

(p. 173)

This refers really to two separate contentions. The first asserts that consumers and citizens have played a more important role than local elites and activists. The second presumes that my investigation stopped at formal texts or at the opinions of the elites and activists with whom I mainly spoke. Both confuse a central aspect of the research design for the book. My aim was to examine what really made an effective difference in social and economic outcomes, by mapping the entire process of state-society relations backwards from the actual social, economic and other data. My book begins with an entire chapter that compares the overall patterns of economic prosperity, environmental quality and social and spatial equity in the eleven French, German and U.S. urban regions. My examination of the causes of these outputs was based on much more than the opinions of the elites and activists I spoke to (who in fact numbered close to 300 by the time the research concluded), and certainly much more than any set of formal texts. In search of reliable explanations, my research triangulated the results from these data with close examination of data on land use, housing prices, municipal budgets, local electoral statistics, census data and many other sources.

But a deeper misunderstanding of the reality of urban governance is also at work in Lippert’s critique. His comment reflects a pervasive tendency in sociolegal scholarship to oppose the influence of ordinary people in everyday legal situations to the influence of elite politics and legal elites. An entire tradition of work in urban politics and urban political economy shows...