Shaping Urban Space Through the Law: Colonies, Metropolises, and Housing Policies between the 19th and 20th Centuries

This research project aims to reconstruct, from a historical-legal perspective, the contribution made by law to the definition of urban space between the 19th and 20th centuries. The study will adopt the perspective of the relationship between metropolises and colonies – which will be considered parts of the same process of producing legal categories, administrative techniques, and models of spatial governance – in order to examine the forms of legal organization of the territory, the regulation of land use, and the structuring of urban coexistence. Within this framework, the city will be viewed as one of the settings in which the relationship between law, the territorialization of power, and the construction of social order manifests itself with particular clarity. The research, open to interdisciplinary dialogue, will also draw on specific case studies, with particular focus on historical patterns of residential segregation