Don Mitchell

The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States

There is a link between changes in the contemporary political economy and the criminalization of homelessness. Anti-homeless legislation can be understood as an attempt to annihilate the spaces in which homeless people must live, and perform everyday functions. This annihilation is a response to the economic uncertainty produced by the current political economy. The process of criminalizing homelessness 1) destroys the very right of homeless people to be; and 2) reinforces particularly brutal notions of citizenship within the public sphere. Such laws are made possible when urban government and surrounding communities and elites seek to promote the urban landscape at the expense of urban public space. This usurpation of public space will have profound impact not only on homeless people but also on how the housed interact with each other.

The people's property?: power, politics, and the public

The Peoples Property?Power, Politics, and the Public Chapter 1: Permitting Protest in Washington, D.C. Chapter 2: Property, Law, and the Plaza of Santa Fe, New Mexico: Turning Social Relations into Space Chapter 3: Privately Public: Property Redevelopment, Public Space and Homelessness in San Diego Chapter 4: Publicly Private: Regulating Space and Creating Community in Syracuses Carousel Center Chapter 5: Publicizing Public Property? The Struggle for the Public in New Yorks Community Gardens Chapter 6: Placing the Public: Discourses of Publicity and Practices of Property Chapter 7: Power, Politics, and Regimes of Publicity: Conclusions Post Script: Interventions Methodological Appendix References Index

The Complex Politics of Relevance in Geography

Abstract As a discipline, geographers have debated what it means to make research relevant. In this article, we argue that the issue of what makes research relevant cannot be separated from the questions of why research should be relevant, how research becomes relevant, the goals of research, and for whom it is intended to be relevant. In this sense, the determination of relevance is a social and political process. We make this point through an evaluation of various writings on relevance, editorials that have appeared in the Newsletter of the Association of American Geographers, and through interviews with researchers. We argue that relevance can be intended, but that commitment to relevant research requires a long-term view and an appreciation for the indirect pathways of relevance.

Cultural landscapes: the dialectical landscape - recent landscape research in human geography

We may think of individual ‘landscapes’ as being compromised, partial, contested and only provisionally stable as modes of ordering the world and our engagement with it. If so, this suggests that we should not think of individual landscapes as discrete pieces of territory because they are supported by, and help to sustain, the interests of mere sections of any given society. Alternatively, we might think of landscapes as being formed in relation to other landscapes and conceptions of landscape. In that case, perhaps also we should base our analysis in terms of the interconnectedness of landscape, its links with other landscapes, other geographies.

The lure of the local: landscape studies at the end of a troubled century

‘Our streets! Our world!’ So answered the amazing coalition of activists – labor, environmental, peace and justice, anti-genetically modified food, health, housing – gathered in Seattle in the waning weeks of the twentieth century to protest the (not-so-new) world order under construction by the World Trade Organization. Facing down tear gas and rubber bullets, no less than the condescending pronouncements of such tribunes of the global ruling class as The Economist or the The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman, activists were making a remarkable, and remarkably sophisticated, argument about the nature of ‘globalization’. So-called ‘free trade,’ they were saying, was a shibboleth for cementing elite control over the spaces of our lives, from city streets to nation-states, from the dinner table to the circuits of capital that span the globe. In response ‘Our streets! Our world!’ stood as a stark recognition that democratic control had to be actively grabbed and staunchly defended, but doing so would only be possible if democratic control of the streets of Seattle (or Dakar or Jakarta) was linked to democratic control over the globe itself – the patterns and reasons for trade, the parceling out of the burdens such trade inevitably brings with it, and the purposes behind the production and consumption of goods. This activist linking of the local to the global (and back again), while clearly a response to linkages already wrought on behalf of global capital, marks a significant advance over the old slogan of the 1970s: Progress in Human Geography 25,2 (2001) pp. 269–281

Introduction: Public Space and the City.

(1996). INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC SPACE AND THE CITY. Urban Geography: Vol. 17, Public Space and the City I, pp. 127-131.

Political Violence, Order, and the Legal Construction of Public Space: Power and the Public Forum Doctrine.

This paper presents a historical geography of the legal construction of public space. I argue that to understand the nature of the laws and court decisions that govern political activity in public space, it is necessary to examine that law not in isolation, but in relation to the social struggles over and in public space that forced legal decision making. I begin by examining a recent Supreme Court decision concerning the rights of anti-abortion protestors and show how that decision was built on a long history of controlling dissent—particularly the dissent of unionizing and striking workers—rather than on a history of protecting the right to assembly and speech in public space. The legal structure of public space derives first from imputing “violence” to those who dissent, and then seeking ways to control that dissent in the name of protecting property rights. I argue, therefore, that it has only been by actively challenging—on the streets and in the courts-legal definitions of appropriate behavior in pu...

Making publics: Immigrants, regimes of publicity and entry to 'the public'

As groups struggle to gain visibility and voice in the public sphere and as new publics form, they may expand the sense of inclusiveness within a polity, but these new publics may also rub against broader, hegemonic ideals of ‘the’ public sphere. This paper utilises the concept of ‘regimes of publicity’ to explore how marginalised groups are included in the public. Regimes of publicity are the prevailing system of laws, practices, and relations that condition the qualities of a public and the ways that it is situated with respect to other publics. In exploring how publics might be formed and received, we focus on three interlinked elements of regimes of publicity—community and social norms, legitimacy, and the relations that constitute property—as they condition the strategies of activists and the resources that different agents and institutions bring to struggles over entry to the public. The argument we present highlights the ongoing nature of struggles for access to the public realm and the fragmented nature of the public.

Contested Engagements: Youth and the Politics of Citizenship

In this paper, a framework is presented for exploring how youth perform their citizenship through political engagements. The framework provides a way to explore the agency of youthful citizens as imagined by different agents and the ways that youth understand their performances as citizenship. Using interviews with university students and administrators at six universities in Manchester and Glasgow, a distinction is highlighted between agency and the performance of political acts in the production of citizenship, and the implications of this distinction for the development of autonomous citizens.

Clean and safe? property redevelopment, public space, and homelessness in downtown san diego

Analyzing the social history of Kizilay Square in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey, this book investigates the relation between public space and politics. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, Batuman argues that the political participation of the social groups in public sphere becomes possible only through spatial appropriation. Yet, the social production of public space is always mediated by the rules and regulations dictated to the space by the power of the state and the economic influence of capital. The clash between the forces of domination (of the state and capital) and appropriation (of marginal groups seeking participation) produce the public space through a constant struggle for hegemony. The book investigates this process through the particular case of the making of Ankara into the capital of the newly born Turkish Republic. The social history of Kizilay Square throughout the 20th century presents a spatial history of the public sphere as a terrain of hegemonic struggle complementing a top-down modernization process.