The article analyses the jurisprudence of international tribunals on the education and housing of Roma and Travellers to understand whether positive obligations can change the hearts and minds of the majority and promote minority identities. Case law on education deals with integration rather than cultural specificities, while in the context of housing it accommodates minority needs. Positive obligations have achieved a higher level of compliance in the latter context by requiring majorities to tolerate the minority way of life in overwhelmingly segregated settings. Conversely, little seems to have changed in education, where legal and institutional reform, as well as a shift in both majority and minority attitudes, would be necessary to dismantle social distance and generate mutual trust. The interlocking factors of accessibility, judicial activism, European politics, expectations of political allegiance and community resources explain jurisprudential developments. The weak justiciability of minority rights, the lack of resources internal to the community and dual identities among the Eastern Roma impede legal claims for culture-specific accommodation in education. Conversely, the protection of minority identity and community ties is of paramount importance in the housing context, subsumed under the right to private and family life.

The Environment and Planning Act (EPA), which will enter into force in 2021, has been called the most influential legislative reform in the Netherlands since World War II. This article forms the introduction to a special issue devoted to the EPA, in which scholars from various disciplines reflect on the societal and legal ramifications of this new act. The authors introduce the different articles but also offer their perspective on the emergence of this new field of research. Socio-legal research into such a vast new regulatory field benefits from the application of multiple perspectives and different research methods. Conspicuously, the authors of the various articles differ on how to assess the new regulation of Dutch spatial planning. Some are pessimistic, others strike a more optimistic note. In this introduction two more perspectives on the law are offered. The perspective of prefigurative law (Davina Cooper) embodies the more optimistic view, whilst the perspective of outsourced law (Pauline Westerman) sides with the pessimists.

The development of the Environment and Planning Act (Omgevingswet) in the Netherlands is an example of an ongoing reform of environmental and planning law that started with big ambitions. This article uses the case of environmental space (gebruiksruimte) to illustrate that it is hard to achieve those ambitions. A bill of the Environment and Planning Act contained regulations to assign environmental space to actors and/or locations. The regulations lacked in subsequent versions of the Environment and Planning Act, especially in the act itself. Despite the fact that on policy level the concept of environmental space can still be used, the lack of a legally binding mechanism for assigning environmental space makes it unlikely that the concept will be used. This hampers realising the ambition to create coherent policies that integrate environmental and spatial planning. It also puts achieving the goal of the law at risk.

This study investigates the strategies people themselves use to deal with situations in which they fear crime. The authors see people as social agents who hold agency and (also) manage their own safety, instead of viewing people as powerless victims. Previous studies have emphasized people’s agency, often through a focus on avoiding dangerous spaces. Building on insights from the fear of crime literature that approaches fear of crime as situational, the authors illustrate how spaces in which people worry about crime can also be transformed (through action) into safe(r) spaces. The article focuses on the context of urban nightlife areas. Thirty students living in Utrecht, the Netherlands were interviewed. Results show that students perform a range of strategies to cope with their fear, including situational avoidance, arranging companionship, increasing alertness, and reasoning. In the discussion the authors reflect on how the application of such strategies is related to (erosion of) ‘mobility’ and individual freedom of movement.

The maxim ‘law in books and law in action’ relays an implicit dichotomy, and though the constitutive nature of law is nowadays commonly professed, the reflex remains to use law in books as an autonomous starting point. Law however, it is argued in this article, has a storyline that commences before its institutional formalisation. Law as ‘a continuous process of becoming’ encompasses both law in books and law in action, and law in action encompasses timelines both before and after the formal coming about of law. To fully understand law, it is necessary to understand the entire storyline of law. Qualitative studies in law and society are well equipped to offer valuable insights on the facets of law outside the books. The insights are not additional to doctrinal understanding, but part and parcel of it. To illustrate this, an ethnographic case study of local bylaws regulating an ethnically diverse public space of everyday life is expanded upon. The case study is used to demonstrate the insights qualitative data yields with regard to the dynamics in which law comes about, and how these dynamics continue for law in action after law has made the books. This particular case study moreover exemplifies how law is one of many truths in the context in which it operates, and how formalised law is reflective of the power constellations that have brought it forth.

Developing effective anti-poaching strategies is difficult because of complex interactions between animals, poachers, and rangers. This study shows the utility of agent-based models (ABM) for unraveling these interactions, and their underlying mechanisms, to identify relevant components for planning ranger operations. Here, two patrol strategies were simulated using an ABM for wildlife crime to quantify their effectiveness under different circumstances. The model showed border patrols to be more effective than search patrols in protecting both solitary and herd animals. Furthermore, the model suggests that rangers catch fewer poachers when patrols are overly focused on locations where poaching was detected previously. The study illustrates that disciplined model development and testing is required for useful conclusions to be drawn, from a fully understood ABM.

Indigenous claims have challenged a number of orthodoxies within state legal systems, one of them being the kinds of proof that can be admissible. In Canada, the focus has been on the admissibility and weight of oral traditions and histories. However, these novel forms are usually taken as alternative means of proving a set of facts that are not in themselves “cultural”, for example, the occupation by a group of people of an area of land that constitutes Aboriginal title. On this view, maps are a neutral technology for representing culturally different interests within those areas. Through Indigenous land use studies, claimants have been able to deploy the powerful symbolic capital of cartography to challenge dominant assumptions about “empty” land and the kinds of uses to which it can be put. There is a risk, though, that Indigenous understandings of land are captured or misrepresented by this technology, and that what appears neutral is in fact deeply implicated in the colonial project and occidental ideas of property. This paper will explore the possibilities for an alternative cartography suggested by digital technologies, by Indigenous artists, and by maps beyond the visual order.

Urban nightlife areas are widely renowned for their emotionally charged nature, affording greater opportunities for transgressions of social norms compared to daytime contexts. Yet, the ways nightlife consumers experience safety in the public spaces of nightlife areas has received limited attention in the academic literatures. This article approaches experienced safety in the public spaces of nightlife areas as emerging from encounters between human and non-human (material, social, cultural) elements grounded in time and space. Such elements include the characteristics of the built environment, the design of public space, police presence, lighting and also first and secondhand experiences and popular media discourses more generally. We hypothesized that encounters between such elements necessarily renders some ambiguity in experienced safety, in the sense that the effect of a particular element on experienced safety is always coproduced in the unfolding encounter. By drawing on a series of interviews with Dutch students in Utrecht, various types of ambiguity are shown to exist depending on both the particularities of the situation at hand and based on differences between individual circumstance and life course. Ambiguity is also shown to exist in the sense that mentioned elements may both comfort and alarm participants at the same time. Our findings infer that we should implement ‘safer nightlife’ initiatives that are tailored to particular contexts, situations and publics. The results also suggest that current interventions seeking to stimulate safety in urban nightlife settings might not be as successful in reducing/enhancing (un)safety as (popular) policy and media discourses have suggested.

Many big cities in Europe have adopted the contours of superdiversity: in many districts, the original population has become just one of the many minorities. This new urban reality is often perceived as threatening. Immigration has become symbolic for the disturbance of community, the undermining of the national identity and a lost sense of feeling at home. Although the concept of superdiversity has controversial meanings, it also functions as an inspiring analytical concept that encourages further reflections on the value and potential implications of living together in cities of arrival. The concept also creates space for multifocal perspectives on socioeconomic, religious, transnational and political differences instead of reducing the urban reality to mere ethnic or cultural differences.

This article seeks to answer how useful the theoretical approaches developed in Europe and the United States are for explaining or understanding the autonomy of law in Indonesia – a nation that is on the verge of becoming a lower-middle-income country and whose legal system presents many of the features found in other developing countries’ legal systems. The article first sketches three lines of theoretical thought that have dominated the inquiry into autonomy of law in (Western) sociology and then assesses to what extent they are represented in the socio-legal studies of Indonesian law. The conclusion is that although socio-legal scholars studying developing countries need supplementary concepts and theories, they can use the Western ones as their point of departure in understanding the functioning of law in a setting that is very different from the one in which these theories were developed.

From a geographical perspective, this article explores positive images of safety in the context of nightlife areas. It also considers the ways by which nightlife visitors’ experienced safety might be nurtured, as an alternative to how experienced lack of safety might be ‘prevented’. From our interviews, we find safety to emerge from interactions between many (im)material elements, and the nightlife consumers themselves. We argue that positive safety can be understood as something that envelopes and at the same time is reworked by individuals, but that does not necessarily require a conscious understanding. From this finding, we offer a different logic and rhetoric regarding safety in nightlife spaces.

The article examines mechanisms of othering the refugees illustrated on one refugee camp in Germany. Based on the theoretical strand of the foreigner dispositif, I analyze spatial and architectural compositions of the camp to outline the differentiation of ‘we’ (nation state) and ‘others’ (refugees). In the process of othering space excludes, controls and identifies refugees as ‘others’. However, being identified as the other, space can also be conceived as a specific space of hope. The findings shed some light on the link between othering, space and identity.

Newark Penn Station is the most frequented train station in New Jersey, United States. Two distinct groups occupy this public space. First are the commuters who travel by the trains to reach destinations for work or pleasure. Second are the transient who do not use the trains but instead remain in and around the station for various reasons, otherwise known as the ‘other.’ The latter population is closely monitored and controlled by law enforcement through a variety of written and unwritten laws and codes of conduct, which are based on broken windows theory and crime prevention through environment design (CPTED). The primary focus is how the ‘other’ seemingly navigates and occupies public space. Through ethnographic research, this paper reflects and reveals the ways in which the station is a living social organism that simultaneously marginalizes and incorporates those defined as the ‘other’ into this space. This complex and contradictory dynamic illustrates the interactions between public spaces and its occupiers and regulators.

Given the rise of mediation in other legal disciplines and the influence of the EU, the call for mediation is increasing in Belgian administrative practice. Several years ago, the legislature took the first steps towards mediation in the judicial administrative procedure. This contribution is a study of the existing forms of mediation with its limitations and possibilities. Taking these findings into account, a possible mediation framework, applicable in the Belgian legal system, is proposed.

The economic analysis of (potential) disasters is an important method to determine the efficacy and efficiency of investments in disaster prevention and mitigation. The Dutch National Risk Assessment (NRA) provides an integrated, whole-of-government and all-hazard approach to Dutch national security. The strategy does not only intend to identify capacity gaps and define measures regarding individual threats and risks, but also to enhance capability planning and policy development concerning overall national security. The approach is multi-disciplinary and based upon scenarios which are evaluated and graded in terms of impact and likelihood according to a unified scoring method. Economic impact is one of the criteria in the NRA risk assessment methodology. This article provides a review of the (applied) scientific literature of the many economic tools and methods that have been used worldwide to estimate the (potential) impact of disasters and provides concrete applications at the micro and macro levels to Dutch cases and scenarios that were developed during the five annual cycles of the NRA's existence (2007-2011). We discuss pros and cons of applied methodologies.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the process of rupture in Brazilian graffiti writer’s subculture resulting in different groups - pichadores, pixadores and grafiteiros - took place in two different, though complementary, stages. The first stage is the commodification of graffiti by successive media campaigns and its penal control by the state. The second stage - which may be considered as a side effect of the first one - consists of the emergence of a new transgressive pixação movement. Instead of merely writing or tagging their signatures and messages on the walls of the city, they claim the freedom of usage of the urban space and contest the importance that property has in the late modernity context.

This article uses a generally accepted conceptualisation of sustainable development that can be operationalized in a judicial context. It focuses on the individual and collective dimensions of the environmental, economic and social pillars, as well as the consideration of inter-generational and intra-generational equity. Case law from the European, African and American systems is analysed to reveal if the elements of sustainable development have been incorporated in their jurisprudence. The analysis reveals that the human rights bodies have used different interpretative methods, some more progressive than others, in order to incorporate the elements of sustainable development in the scope of their mandate, even if they do not mention the concept as such. The overall conclusion is that sustainable development has been operationalized through human rights courts to a certain extent. Sometimes, however, a purely individualised approach to human rights creates a hurdle to further advance sustainable development. The conclusion creates the impression that sustainable development is not just a concept on paper, but that it in fact can be operationalized, also in other courts and quasi-courts. Moreover, it shows that the institutional structure of human rights courts has been used in other areas than pure human rights protection, which means that other areas of law might make use of it to fill the gap of a non-existing court structure.

This article engages the narrative of fragmentation in international law by asserting that legal academics and professionals have failed to probe more deeply into ‘fragmentation’ as a concept and, more specifically, as a spatial metaphor. The contention here is that however central fragmentation has been to analyses of contemporary international law, this notion has been conceptually assumed, ahistorically accepted and philosophically under-examined. The ‘fragment’ metaphor is tied historically to a cartographic rationality – and thus ‘reality’ – of all social space being reducible to a geometric object and, correspondingly, a planimetric map. The purpose of this article is to generate an appreciation among international lawyers that the problem of ‘fragmentation’ is more deeply rooted in epistemology and conceptual history. This requires an explanation of how the conflation of social space with planimetric reduction came to be constructed historically and used politically, and how that model informs representations of legal practices and perceptions of ‘international legal order’ as an inherently absolute and geometric. This implies the need to dig up and expose background assumptions that have been working to precondition a ‘fragmented’ characterization of worldly space. With the metaphor of ‘digging’ in mind, I draw upon Michel Foucault’s ‘archaeology of knowledge’ and, specifically, his assertion that epochal ideas are grounded by layers of ‘obscure knowledge’ that initially seem unrelated to a discourse. In the case of the fragmentation narrative, I argue obscure but key layers can be found in the Cartesian paradigm of space as a geometric object and the modern States’ imperative to assert (geographic) jurisdiction. To support this claim, I attempt to excavate the fragment metaphor by discussing key developments that led to the production and projection of geometric and planimetric reality since the 16th century.