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University at Buffalo School of Law

Journal Articles

Law and Urban Planning

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Governing Certain Things: The Regulation Of Street Trees In Four North American Cities, Irus Braverman Jan 2008

Governing Certain Things: The Regulation Of Street Trees In Four North American Cities, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

Most sociolegal studies of the urban street focus on the human element. By focusing on the tree, my Article offers a unique perspective on the interrelations between various actors within the public spaces of modern North American cities. Situated at the intersection of legal geography, anthropology, and Science and Technology Studies, this Article demonstrates how natural artifacts function as technologies of governance, thereby masking crucial political interventions behind a natural facade. The tensions between nature and the city, as embedded in both the construction and the regulation of street trees, provide an unusual perspective on the management of urban populations …


Powers Of Illegality: House Demolitions And Resistance In East Jerusalem, Irus Braverman Jun 2007

Powers Of Illegality: House Demolitions And Resistance In East Jerusalem, Irus Braverman

Journal Articles

This article examines how techniques of illegality based in planning laws and policy are utilized to dominate the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem. Although the demolition of homes is the most spectacular spatial mechanism of illegality exercised by Israel in East Jerusalem, my focus in the first part of the article is on more mundane techniques of illegality, such as mapping, filing, and arbitrariness. The second part of the article introduces the notion of resistance and explores the illegal building carried out by East Jerusalemite Palestinians as an act of spatial protest. In examining tactics of "everyday" resistance, I suggest …