Does the City Have Speech?

Abstract

Arguing, as I do in this essay, 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. It is not present in either one of these bodies of scholarship; this is particularly so since I do not confine the notion of speech to that of urban government, nor do I construct the content of the city's speech in the terms provided by the law. Thus the inquiry requires expanding the analytic terrain for examining the concept of each, speech and the city.