NXC Issue # 6
School of Architecture Planning and Landscape
(University of Calgary)
September 2021
Design credits: Beatriz Martins
These questions, borne of an inquiry initially sparked by Alex Lehnerer’s work Grand Urban Rules, are the pathways through which an interdisciplinary team from Law and SAPL explored how rules shape the urban form and the city. In this edition of NXC, the authors, Kirandeep Kaur (SAPL) and Benjamin Sasges (Law), argue that the relationship between law and form is not a unilateral imposition of power, but one characterized by bilateralism, with both sides pushing and pulling against the other.
To illustrate this relationship, the authors examined four examples as intersections of law and form. These were a right to sunlight, incentives for development in the downtown core, backyard suites, and redevelopment.
Spatial Dimension of Law
The city is the largest human-made physical artifact. However, how is its form to be explained? Is it randomly emerging as the result of thousand
