This volume offers diverse insights into urban law, with emerging theories and analyses of topics ranging from criminal reform and urban housing, social and economic inequality and financial crises, and democratization and freedom for individual identity and space.

Nestor M. Davidson is the Albert A. Walsh Chair Professor of Real Estate, Land Use and Property Law at Fordham Law School and the Faculty Director of the Urban Law Center. Professor Davidson has published widely in the fields of property theory, urban law, and affordable housing law and policy. He earned his AB from Harvard College and his JD from Columbia Law School. Professor Davidson previously practiced with the firm of Latham & Watkins and served as Special Counsel and Principal Deputy General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Geeta Tewari serves as Associate Director of the Urban Law Center at Fordham Law School. She earned her BA in Government from Cornell University and her JD from Fordham Law School. She has practiced public interest law for the New York City Law Department and the Washington D.C. Office of the Attorney General. Tewari also holds a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Columbia University, where she taught creative and expository writing to New York City high school students and the Columbia undergraduate and alumni community. Information about her writing is available at www.geetatewari.com.

Introduction; Part I: Law and belonging in the urban context; 1. Contested values: how Jim Crow segregation ordinances redefined property rights; 2. Privacy, participation and the city; 3. Discrepancy between legal approaches and policy goals: a case study of subsidized housing in Hong Kong; 4. Eviction as a tool for crime control: fighting drug-related crime in the Netherlands and the United States; 5. Urban citizens and water: Johannesburg and Dublin's experience with the human right to water; 6. Who owns the sidewalk? Analysing spatial reorganization amidst regulation and hierarchies in the Pondy Bazaar Street Market, Chennai, India; 7. 'Better city, better life'? Urban transformation and conflict management in the global south; Part II: Innovation and urban governance in legal perspective; 8. Financing local governments in times of recession: financial and legal innovation in the face of the 2008 crisis; 9. Keeping municipal law making democratic: a critical appraisal of the legal position of third party rights from the state of Victoria, Australia; 10. Saving sriracha, fighting city power: an LA school view of urban law in a hot sauce conflict; 11. Cities as stakeholders: corporate social responsibility in an urban environment