Urbanizing Human Rights Law: Cities, Local Governance and Corporate Power

Abstract This article considers ways in which human rights law ought to respond to a growingly urban global order of blurred private—corporate—and state power. Fragmented and dispersed power comes together, in different configurations of public and private, in the cities and towns of the world. For this reason, local government presents the appropriate scale at which to re-conceptualize the operation of international human rights norms, also against private power. This requires engaging not only with the reach and leanings of international human rights standards but also with the manner in which they are rendered applicable, through domestic constitutional law, against state and non-state actors at a local scale. The urbanization of human rights law accordingly also requires a second look at the powers, competencies and responsibilities of urban local government under domestic constitutional law.