Madrid wants to compete with the big global cities articulated within the interests of transnational finantial capital by adapting to the new economic and social transformation of the last recent decades. The Madrid Nuevo Norte project is presented as a strategic solution to achieve these aims by reconnecting fragmented urban areas and implementing sustainable innovation in its development process. However, since the project is led by a private agent together with the Council of Madrid in a private-public partnership agreement, this raises the hypothesis that urban legality, as a non-neutral tool, is subordinated to private interest, weakening the right to the city and aggravating socio-spatial inequalities. This study questions how law operates not just as a regulation device but as an active urban space producer that is instrumentalized to legitimize spatial exclusive reconfigurations. The starting point of this study is the analysis of the legal and discursive apparatus of Madrid Nuevo Norte by sources as the main normative documents that support the project and official narratives extracted from journal articles and the discourse of the main stakeholder of the project itself. The aim of this article is to identify how legal and discursive production of space articulates tensions between urban governance, right to the city and socio-spatial justice. This analysis allows us to conclude that urban legality is instrumentalized as a technology for social order under capital interests since law enables the subordination of public goods to private profitability.