МІСЬКЕ ПРАВО: СУЧАСНИЙ ПРАВОВИЙ ЛАНДШАФТ

The article argues that the rapid strengthening of cities as centers of social life and governance requires revising modern-era concepts of the relationship between national and local (urban) law and recognizing urban law as an autonomous legal locus shaped by spatial criteria. Against the background of global urbanization and the historical role of urban law in the formation of national legal orders, it shows how the once homogeneous legal space of the nation-state differentiates into national and local (urban) legal orders, each interacting in its own way with international legal processes.Using an urbanist approach, the author characterizes the city as a legal center with a much higher concentration of legal relations and a specific legal culture, which justifies orienting legal analysis to the city as an independent legal unit. At the same time, many cities are burdened with legislation that poorly corresponds to urban realities and lack institutional capacity to adapt norms, which generates widespread informality, parallel regulatory systems, and “informal urban law” as a de facto norm.The article links these dynamics to a broader crisis of state legitimacy, especially in “criminal states” (aggressor, oppressive, corrupt, or negligent), where national law becomes a decorative façade for criminal governance and loses the ability to mediate growing tensions between urban communities and discredited state institutions. In such conditions, the traditional functional division in which cities specialize in finance and states in warfare becomes exhausted, and the balance between cities and nation-states is shifting, which the author illustrates through the impact of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.On this basis, the article conceptualizes “urban law” as the body of norms that shape cities, their land use, institutions, and finances, and that structure the relationship between city and state within a differentiated legal landscape. The concluding thesis is that future legal development will increasingly depend on negotiated compromises between powerful cities and effective nation-states, and on constructing urban legal frameworks capable of reconciling intense local legal cultures with broader national and international legal orders.