From space immaterial: the invisibility of the lawscape

This article aims to interrogate law's ambivalent relationship with urban space. It deals with the paradoxical relation between law and the city, visibility and invisibility, materiality and abstraction, and polis and metropolis. It builds on previous work on the lawscape, namely the priority of invitation by law or the city to be conditioned by the other, and expands this line of thought towards a more tangible understanding of visibility and its mutual constitution with invisibility. We believe that spatialisation is a relevant avenue for law's (re)conceptualisation because it moves away from a description of humanism based on the universality of subjectivity, and paves the way for a particularised and material description of law's multiplicity that specifically addresses law's social positioning. This inevitably leads to a dematerialisation of space and the reinstatement of circularity between concreteness and abstraction. Inspired by some of the themes addressed by the contributors in this issue, we begin constructing a vocabulary of lawscaping, where law and urban space are brought together in an epistemological embrace that targets and eventually questions the solipsistic way in which the two of them have been conceptualised so far.

The design studio as liminal space

This study focuses on the efficacy of design studio as a form of teaching and learning, where traditional approaches can act to position the tutor as a defender of the knowledge community rather than a discourse guide for the student. The broad curriculum of architectural education with its divergent outcomes resulting from project based learning also makes it difficult to agree on what constitutes the fundamental elements of the curriculum. The research used an approach based on threshold concepts to assist in identifying and overcoming these shortcomings. Such approaches have been described as 'liminal': holding the learner in a supportive 'in-between' state where learning resources can be directed to that which is troublesome and conceptually difficult. The study involved the use of practices to identify troublesome knowledge in design studio and conceptualise blended learning as part of a liminal studio space.