The space of city in reconstruction: the lawscapesof Barcelona and Berlin

The experiments in urban renewal and reconstruction undertaken by the local government of Barcelona and Berlin in the final decades of the twentieth century have been widely recognised as the most important attempts to engage afresh with the idea of the city. This idea has been constructed through a resemiologisation of the physical urban space and its relation to juridico- political processes. In this article I conduct a comparative examination of the two experiences. I focus on the ways in which, in both cases, the major issues and planning problems were identified and intervention criteria and methods were defined in the formulation of urban renewal strategies and projects. Borrowing a term recently appeared in the legal studies contest, I have chosen to call these urban processes “lawscapes”, which means the reciprocal determination of law and urban space both in their enabling and limiting aspect. The term denotes the continuous yet invisible presence of normativity in urban development and, conversely, the continuous yet invisible presence of spatial materiality in the laying out of normative stategies. In what follows, I shall be observing a distinct moment of the development of these lawscapes, namely the emergence of comparable political/normative and spatial strategies that attempted to recover the value of the city’s tradition through a strategic reconsideration of normative devices that habitually regulate physical and social space (from planning restrictions, environmental regulation and zoning to borders between private, public and restricted access areas, social control and power architecture and landscaping). These normative devices have a strong and indeed ubiquitous presence in the city, since their presence is concentrated and overt, in close contact with the production, consumption and disposal processes, intensified due to the physical proximity. The urban development strategies in Barcelona and Berlin emerged from a wide-ranging, indepth reflection on the history of the city. The aim was to rediscover the processes required to reactivate and recover the collective identity of the European city, through a notion of urban space that reflects the idea of urban civilisation. This notion of urban space has distinctive “generative” effects, which principally include a physical reality, a locus recognisable in its singularity and a vital and historically consolidated sphere of individual and collective experience.