ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that cities have speech, albeit of a very different sort from that of citizens and corporations, is in many ways a question transversal to both the law and urbanism. The city's speech happens in an in-between zone: it is not quite simply the city as material and social order. A second analytic tactic, partly arising from the first, is the need actively to destabilize stabilized meanings. Such destabilizing allows me to see or understand that which is not contained in the main narratives that explain an epoch or organize a field of scholarship, and we need to do this especially at a time of rapid transformations. Among these deurbanizing forces in the current period are extreme forms of inequality, the privatizing of urban space with its diverse expulsions, and the rapid expansion of massive surveillance of citizens in the most "advanced" democracies across the world. These forces silence the speech of the city and destroy urban capabilities.
