Regulatory spaces, physical and metaphorical: On the legal and spatial occupation of fire-safety legislation

This paper considers the design of the built environment as a ‘regulatory space’ [Hancher & Moran 1989] comprised of simultaneously legal and spatial opportunities for occupation. Taking a series of Acts of fire safety legislation, its studies the effects they have had on the built fabric of the City of Edinburgh, reading the city both as a history of competing govern-mentalities [Dean 2009], but also as catalogue of their un-foreseen consequences, a space through which alternative concerns emerge, and are accommodated. Focussing then on contemporary debates surrounding the promise of performance-based codes for fire-safety, it considers how architects have been involved in shaping this simultaneously legal and spatial context. Drawing on existing technical literatures [Brannigan 2000], it will suggest that the governing rationale of such codes depends upon an aesthetic connection between scientific and political notions of economy, one which obscures the fundamental goal of such standardisation - the setting of socially acceptable margins of safety. The paper concludes with a search for alternative aesthetic compacts which study the spatial side-effects of prescriptive standardisation.