Syncretism of the City: Legal Aspects of Various Scientific Theories of the City

Nearly a dozen and a half different humanities, natural and technical sciences have chosen the city as a subject of research and, within their subject areas, have developed theoretical approaches to defining the livesustaining activities of the city. All spheres of the city’s existence are interconnected, at least to some extent, by a complex system of city legal relationships and are combined into a single complex, dynamic, controversial, but rather stable structure. In other words, we can, by means of law, investigate the whole (syncretism) of various scientific approaches to the analysis and description of the system of life of the city and its inhabitants. The author investigates various approaches to the concept of syncretism, including the essence of syncretism in legal context. The concept of syncretism is applied to the city in order to present it as a legal framework linking the knowledge of the city of various humanities into the system of social relations in order to explore the main spheres of the population’s life. The paper investigates some basic provisions of the theories of the city of such humanities as history, sociology, philosophy, psychology, economics, urban studies and political science as a matter of law. The purpose of the study is to form a new, comprehensive legal approach to the understanding of the essence of urban life and urbanization processes within the framework of legal urbanology with due regard to the totality of theoretical and practical knowledge about cities accumulated in some humanities. This study implements an interdisciplinary approach based on the use of sources from different fields of scientific knowledge on the basis of general scientific and private scientific research methods (analysis, synthesis, deduction, hypothetical, statistical, comparative-legal, and prognostic methods). Analysis of legal aspects of the main approaches of some humanities to the study of the city shows their syncretic character and the possibility of forming a generalized legal theory of the city within the framework of legal urbanology as a branch in legal science on the basis of fundamental and applied interdisciplinary studies of the city.

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