ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with Hancher and Moran's term, then, in order to take their metaphor literally. The first part, Legal spaces/physical spaces, offers an illustrated history of the formation of the City of Edinburgh's built fabric and fire-safety legislature. The second part, Occupying fire-safety legislation, uses this extended conception of regulatory space to make a detailed study of a specific regulatory ambition: the limitation of travel distance. Hancher and Moran's emphasis on occupiability provides a useful contact point within this literal-metaphorical slippage because it helps identity the particular actancy of space in the formation of this arena. For the emerging neoliberal governmentality, prescriptive regulatory regimes were precisely the forms of clumsy government that undermined political economy, and should be transferred to the private sector. The regulatory space of contemporary fire-safety legislation was defined by a set of overlapping sectoral interests for the improvement of scientific and academic rigour, the expansion of professional competencies and markets, and for political reforms.
