ABSTRACT
In attempting to determine the relation between environmental law and the urban system, one observes connections of interdependence on several levels and of varying importance. On a microlevel, environmental law regulates the city by ways of planning regulations, transport, air pollution thresholds, clean water levels, noise pollution, land uses, recycling, etc., while the urban system, in its capacity as the geography with the greater concentration of environmental problems due to the density of activity, challenges the limits of environmental law and raises issues that require both localised and globalised information and decision-making procedures. Notions such as ‘urban sustainability’, ‘urban agenda 21’ and ‘greening cities’ come from policy-making sectors, whereas other primary tools of environmental law that come from the core of environmental legal developments, such as Environmental Impact Assessment, Integrated Pollution Control, Market-Based Mechanisms and so on, are also transformed and adapted to the exigencies of the urban environment.1 On a macrolevel, the relation between environmental law and the city echoes the well-debated question whether law is conducive to social change or rather social change precedes legal reform. Forms of attempted social or legal coercion can be observed in the relation between the legal and the urban, especially in issues such as social justice, urban minorities, public participation, environmental degradation as a consequence/ co-requisite of social exclusion, and so on. In their ramifications, these issues offer a fertile ground for identifying the relation between the legal and the urban as being variably one of confluence, conflict, mutual influence, antagonism, constructive co-existence, control, and so on.
