At home in the high-rise: law, time, and place in a vertical city

This paper foregrounds the varied and uneven temporalities between law and new urban developments. In some cities, new urban developments are carefully anticipated and regulated by law, while in others, authorities struggle to foresee or adequately respond to the scale and pace of urban transformation. Against this backdrop, the paper asks: how do people navigate everyday life in a new type of housing when the legal scaffolding needed to support everyday matters arising from new living arrangements is not there (yet)? The paper addresses this question through an ethnographic study of everyday life in super-tall high-rises in Skopje, North Macedonia. This research points to two main conclusions. The first concerns the complex interplay among place, law, and time in new urban developments, raising questions about whether law is structurally pre-determined to lag behind urban change, reacting after changes have materialized, or whether law needs its own time to develop. The second concerns the relationship between this law–place–time dynamic and processes of home-making and senses of belonging. The paper demonstrates how making and maintaining a sense of home in new housing forms depends on housing law that is fit for purpose. It shows how law and senses of home are co-constitutive. Home is shaped not only by affective, social, and material relations, but also by legal ones. By combining ethnographic perspectives with analyses of law, the paper proposes a polystance methodological framework for examining the relationship between law and place in rapid urban change.