Mariana Valverde: How Small Rules Order Our City

Small rules order the city more than grand theories, and that is the wager of Mariana Valverde, a sociologist of law at the University of Toronto, in Everyday Law on the Street (2012) and her article Seeing Like a City (2011). A restaurant receives a licence, a parcel changes its permitted use, a police patrol decides where to intervene: none of these scenes seems capable of explaining how a city works, yet Valverde asks us to look precisely there. Licensing, policing, zoning, regulations and jurisdictions produce spatial order through concrete actions, and governing the city means distributing activities, competencies and possibilities across territory with rules that seem technical and minor but together organise who may do what, where and under whose authority.

The legal production of space: licence, zoning, regulation, policing

The mechanism begins when a rule connects with a space, an activity and a competent authority. A licence permits or conditions a practice; zoning assigns possible uses to different parts of the city; a regulation establishes permitted and prohibited conduct; police exercise capacities in specific places; jurisdiction defines which authority decides which issue. Valverde directs attention to those operations because power needs techniques to become effective: knowing a major law or an ideology is not enough, one must observe how a rule reaches a street, a business or a parcel. It is the legal production of space, an order that emerges from many decisions that fit together, overlap or enter into tension.

Toronto: inspectors, street vendors and the discretion that decides

Toronto is her laboratory. In Everyday Law on the Street, Valverde accompanied municipal inspectors, police officers and licensing officials and documented how food stalls, taxis, signs, noise, patios and rental housing are regulated, and how those everyday decisions produce inequalities: appearance and use rules are enforced more strictly in some neighbourhoods than others, migrant street vendors bear requirements that established businesses never meet, and the inspector's discretion decides in practice who can make a living on the street. A boring document, she shows, has greater spatial effects than many speeches about cities.

Scale and jurisdiction: seeing like a city versus seeing like a state

Scale and jurisdiction are the third element. The same conduct observed in two spaces governed by different rules or authorities receives different responses depending on who has competence and which regulation applies, and Valverde shows that urban power operates through scales, forms of knowledge and seemingly minor legal techniques that combine without a central decision: different authorities intervene on fragments of space and on problems defined in different ways. Against James Scott's Seeing Like a State, which describes a power that simplifies and standardises, seeing like a city means governing through the pragmatic combination of inherited rules, partial competencies and technical knowledge.

Foucault, criticism and what changes when you look at the desk

The influence of Michel Foucault explains the approach: power appears less as something stored inside an institution and more as something exercised through practices, and Valverde brings that sensibility to the concrete sociolegal configurations of the city, combinations of rules, authorities, knowledge and social relations in a specific situation. The question shifts from who holds power to how it manages to operate, and later studies of anti-begging bylaws, Airbnb regulation or access controls on public space have followed her method. Critics note that attention to detail can lose sight of economic structures; she replies that structures act only through counters and desks.

Valverde's lesson is that the city is governed from the administrative desk as much as from the council chamber, and that changing it requires reading its small rules: which licences are required, who gets inspected, which uses the map allows and which authority decides. An urban policy that looks only at big decisions ignores the everyday legal fabric that produces inequality street by street, and one that looks at it can correct it with the same modest tool that created it: a different document at the same desk.