Contextualisation of policy and law in sustainable urban development

The old tension between planning and law is revived in current practices of sustainable development. Urban professionals often blame central regulation for frustrating an inventive integration of local initiatives and policies. Against this background, the authors focus on the potential of ‘legal contextualisation’: the challenge of how to improve on regulation in such a way that it guides local practices in a normative sense but simultaneously enables optimal use of local – context bounded – option space. In order to make legal contextualisation researchable, the next four operational avenues of analysis are constructed in this paper: the normative dimension (requiring quality of legal norms); the relational dimension (studying the alignment of norms in different positions, such as the legislation, the court, and social compliance); the temporal dimension (searching the alignment of different moments of legal validation); and the functional dimension (making transparent the different roles that government agencies may take).