This Special Issue of Urban Studies seeks to

address this lacuna in knowledge by explor-ing the interrelationships between regulation and the design and production of urban space, with a focus on the practices of architecture. This task is important because a feature of modern life is the increase in forms of governance and (re)regulation, infl uencing everything from food production and its distribution, to the protection of personal health and safety. For some, we are living in an over-regulated world, characterised by, in the urban context, a plethora of rules about conduct in public spaces, the emergence of privatised redevelopment sites that restrict, through formal regulations, rights of access, and an increase in surveillance as part of policy to regularise and normalise citizens’ behaviour (see, for instance, Blumenberg and Ehrenfeucht, 2008; Miller, 2007). Such regularisation of behaviour was highlighted by the leader of the British Conservative party David Cameron (2009) who, in a speech about government powers in the UK, refer-red to ‘control state Britain’. Here, Cameron acknowledged the well-documented trend, observed world-wide, towards an expansio