Legal geographies in the making: urban inequality, neighbourhood networks and pandemic territorialities

Abstract

In March of 2020, the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) escalated intoa global health emergency. In Madrid, public institutions were overwhelmedby this crisis, and mutual aid networks were deployed in multiple neighbour-hoods to assist thousands of families—approximately 15,000 households—with food and care in the absence of actions taken by the Madrid City Coun-cil. Drawing on a mixed methodology that combines discourse analysis andstatistical data from social actors and multi-level institutions, this study aimsto highlight the patterns of socio-spatial inequalities in Madrid in light of theurban impact of pandemic regulations and the role of public institutions inre-territorialising its already existing inequalities through legal zoning. In par-ticular, this study examines the relationship between the territorial irruptionof COVID-19-related collective action initiatives and the re-spatialisation ofsocial inequalities in Madrid. In line with this objective, two additional ques-tions are addressed. The study highlights the value of a legal geographytheoretical framework in examining how law works as a political technologyover territory and also shows how social organisations and networks haveclaimed legal regulations as bottom-up social change processes, challeng-ing the dynamics in the political production of law. The aim of this work istwofold: on the one hand, we wonder to what extent the solidarity networkscould be related to urban territorialities and the spatialisation of socialinequalities in Madrid. On the other hand, we aim to show how a legal geog-raphy perspective could be useful in examining how law is used over terri-tory as a political technology and as a surveillance tool and, conversely,how from social movements representing social networks in pandemic,many regulations are demanded and vindicated as bottom-up social changeprocesses that mean a contention of former dynamics in the political pro-duction of law