From walls to membranes: fortress polis and the governance of urban public space in 21st century Britain

Drawing on the work of Paul Virilio, this paper addresses changes in the architectural and legal topography of the urban landscape through an examination of regulatory patterns, which increasingly intensify governance through, and as, ‘control’. Such regulation is ambivalent in that it cuts across many traditionally discrete regimes of power melding them into new forms with new effects; as a consequence it is no longer sufficient to think in terms of such distinctions as private/public, civil/criminal, and so on. This paper argues that a concern with patterns of enclosure and privatisation in our urban centres must now be placed within the context of changes in architectural practice and technology, which the authors term ‘open architecture’, and the embedding of governance through partnership, which give particular emphasis to the use of dematerialised and diffused modes of control. The paper utilises Virilio’s history and image of the fortress, which he tracks from a material form to a dematerialised form, to envisage these developments and to provide the foundation for an understanding of the importance of the development of practices of surveillance into, what the authors term, ‘total registration’ as a feature and function of governance through ‘control’.

Patent Cases in the Court of Chancery, 1714–58

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it discusses recent improvements in the cataloguing of Chancery bills and pleadings entered between 1714 and 1758, held in the C 11 series at the National Archives. This has made it much easier to locate cases by subject, and a methodology for doing this is described. Secondly, the article outlines the results of work carried out in C 11 on cases relating to patents for invention. Although there has been significant research into how other forms of intellectual property right were adjudicated in the Court of Chancery, notably copyright, patent law for this period remains obscure. The article shows that Chancery (along with the common law courts) retained the principal jurisdiction in patent law, rather than the Privy Council as was once thought.