Nicholas Blomley

Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid

Abstract Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.

Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges

Abstract Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuryEngland have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particularestate maps. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus onthe consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producingenclosure.Inparticular,Iemphasisetheimportantworkthathedgesdid,physically,symbolicallyandlegally,inthedispossessionofthecommoner.Actingasanorganicbarbed wire, the hedge was increasingly put to work to protect the lands of thepowerful. Disrupting the propertied spaces of the commoning economy, hedgeswere not surprisingly targeted by those who opposed privatisation. The hedge,as both a sign and material barrier, served complicated and sometimes opposingends. It materialised private property’s right to exclude, but thus came into conflictwith common property’s right not to be excluded. The hedge was both an edge toproperty and was itself property. Both the encloser and the commoner, however,had property interests in the hedge. If broken, the hedge could signal violenceand riot, or the legitimate assertion of common right. The hedge served as an oftenformidablematerialbarrier,yetthisverymaterialitymadeitvulnerableto‘breaking’and ‘leveling’.‘The history of private property is rather silent on the conditions that produced it’(Mitchell, 2002)‘Enclosure was an act, or a series of actions, of creating new forms of boundary. Itinvolved placing hedges, ditches, fences, walls, pales’ (Johnson, 1996: 71)

Landscapes of property

If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscapes, in both senses, can serve to reify and naturalize dominant property relations but can also serve as spaces of contestation. Such landscapes, however, cannot be disentangled from the places in which they are positioned. The A. uses this framework to make sense of resistance to gentrification in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, Canada, a poor neighborhood with a rich history of activism. A collective property claim by the poor has been staked out through the material use, production, and representation of an urban landscape. Such local meanings and practices, however, are threatened by outsiders, who are seen to map and use this landscape in very different ways.

How to turn a beggar into a bus stop: law, traffic and the 'function of the place'

A review of recent Canadian case law on the constitutionality of legal controls on begging reveals the importance of an unacknowledged view of space and behaviour that I call the traffic code. The paper endeavours to take this code seriously, unpacking its logic and scope. In particular, it explores its legal effects, noting that it deflects rights-based arguments on behalf of the public poor. Its emphasis upon space, use and behaviour appears to be not only illiberal, but curiously aliberal, operating without reference to rights. It is suggested, however, that it may in fact rely upon some deeply liberal notions of rights and space. This, perhaps, allows for a rights-based critique of the traffic code. This, and other possibilities for challenges to the traffic code, are explored in the conclusion.

Rights of passage : sidewalks and the regulation of public flow

1. Pedestrianism Pedestrianism and Police. Pedestrianism, People and Things. Pedestrianism and Social Justice. Overview of Contents 2. Civic Humanism and the Sidewalk The Sidewalk as Political Space. The Sidewalk as Civic Space. The Sidewalk as Walking Space 3. Thinking Like an Engineer Administrative Pedestrianism. Pervasive Pedestrianism. The Taken for Granted 4. Producing and Policing the Sidewalk Sidewalk Law Obstruction and Encroachments. Other Sidewalk Rationalities 5. The History of Pedestrianism The Invention of the Sidewalk. The Reformist Sidewalk. Administrative Pedestrianism at Work. The Public Sidewalk. The Incomplete Sidewalk 6. Judicial Pedestrianism Introduction. The Public Highway 7. Obstructions of Justice? Speech, Protest and Circulation. Sidewalks, the Homeless, and Judicial Pedestrianism. Things and Bodies 8. Taking a Constitutional: Circulation, Begging, and the Mobile Self Introduction Political Pedestrianism. Conclusions 9. Hidden in Plain View

Simplification is Complicated: Property, Nature, and the Rivers of Law:

A number of scholars have criticized the ways in which property law simplifies nature. Such reductive simplifications are seen as being reliant upon a claim to mastery and dominion that is belied by the essential complexity and dynamism of the natural world. Drawing from a close reading of a property-boundary dispute involving the historical movements of the Missouri River, I supplement this account by revealing the ways in which legal simplication is itself complicated: that is, both dependent on considerable amounts of practical work, and subject to breakdown, ambiguity, and contradiction. Rather than a singular river, made legible through the unfolding of a unitary legal logic, I reveal several conflicting ‘rivers’ produced through property law. I conclude by trying to make sense of property as a set of practices that serve to produce the ‘effect’ of property. These practices, while often messy and contradictory, are, nevertheless, significant in the installation of property as a powerful organizing device through which the social world is made meaningful.

Critical geography: anger and hope

I Deradicalization? Leftist academics in the Anglo-American world,1 if we are to believe some commentators, have won. Observers on the Right, such as Roger Kimball (1991), warn against the rise of ‘tenured radicals’ within the American academy whose goal is ‘nothing less than the destruction of the values, methods, and goals of traditional humanistic study’ (p. xi). David Horowitz (1998) (author of a recent book on the 100 most dangerous US professors) argues that, despite appearances, the Left is not in retreat, but has seized control of the academy through a calculated 20-year assault designed ‘to politicize the curriculum and infuse it with left wing agendas’ (p. 34). Those Marxist scholars who lament their exclusion from current scholarship will be heartened to learn from Horowitz that ‘discredited Marxism still provides the paradigm for every current radical ideology from feminism to queer theory’ (p. 33). American politicians have begun to propose controls on such radicals, while websites (eg, uclaprofs. com) urge students and alumni to monitor left-leaning professors. Some scholars on the left, meanwhile, worry that that the Left has become a victim of its own success. Eric Lott (2006) lambasts ‘boomer liberals’, such as Todd Gitlin, Russell Jacoby and Martha Nussbaum, who have, he claims, seized the political limelight and distorted leftist politics.2 For Petras (2001), many left intellectuals have become instruments of bourgeois hegemony. He excoriates many leftist academics for legitimizing hegemony through an uncritical use of hegemonic concepts and categories, such as ‘globalization’ or the ‘information revolution’ (cf. Baeten, 2002). Once radical researchers now crave the symbols of bourgeois prestige (the Chairs, prizes, grants and so on), and tailor their radicalism in order to secure a successful career, allowing nostalgia for a distant radical past to become a substitute for serious analysis, for example, or embracing a form of ‘cocktail leftism’, where conventional research and teaching during work time is separated from after-hours radical chitchat. Put more bluntly, ‘it is . . . chic to be radical. But it usually Progress reports

Mud for the Land

Besides the conventional financial and technical requirements, the typical property leasing agreement often includes the provision that a tenant be assured of the “quiet enjoyment of the land.” The term quiet, apparently, refers not to protection from excess noise but an assurance that the tenant can enjoy his or her possession without interference and interruption, free from disturbance and dissension.1 But quiet also has a more active sense in the language of law, as settlements of ambiguous or disputed property relations speak of “quieting title.” It’s a rather archaic phrase but an evocative and suggestive one for my purposes. What it tells us is that property doesn’t just happen. Just as quiet can be a verb, so property is an enactment (Rose 1994; Seed 1995). In this sense, a property regime is never complete and self-evident but requires a continual doing. The doing of real property happens not only in courtrooms and the law schools. Property must also be put to work on material spaces and real people, including owners and those who are to be excluded from that which is owned. In this grounding

Mobility, empowerment and the rights revolution1

Abstract For many years, Leftists have been sceptical of the emancipatory potential of rights, arguing that their individualism and liberal grounding are, if anything, counter-progressive. More recently, this argument has been criticized by a number of progressive authors, who point to the potential of rights as mobilizers and subversive weapons. I explore the relevance of this debate in relation to mobility rights, arguing that rights can indeed be empowering, yet—drawing on the Canadian experience—can also be either irrelevant for many social movements, or even antithetical to their aims. The difference, I suggest, lies in the social location within which rights are put to work: rights discourse can be empowering in community settings, whilst judicial arenas can prove unfriendly.

Performing Property, Making the World

Scholars under the ‘Progressive Property’ banner distinguish between dominant conceptions of property, and its underlying realities. The former, exemplified by Singer’s ‘ownership model’, is said to misdescribe extant forms of ownership and misrepresent our actual moral commitments in worrisome ways. Put simply, it is argued that our representations of property’s reality are incorrect, and that these incorrect representations lead us to make bad choices. Better understandings of the reality of property should lead to better representations, and thus improved outcomes. However, the relationship between ‘reality’ and ‘representation’ is not made fully explicit. This essay seeks to supplement progressive property through a more careful exploration of the relationship between the two, by drawing from performativity theory. From this perspective, accounts of property are in an important sense not descriptions of an external reality, but help bring reality into being. The ownership model is not so much constative (descriptive) as performative. Such an account, I suggest, directs us to several important insights. Rather than asking what property is or is not, the task becomes that of trying to describe how property is performed (or not) into being. But concepts do not stand alone: rather, other ideas, people, things and other resources have to be enrolled in complicated (and often fragile) combinations. Rather than criticizing the ownership model for its mismatch with reality, we might consider that models do not have to be ‘true’, just successful. As such, it may be more useful for progressive scholars of property to redirect their energy into enquiring how it is that certain conceptions of property are successful, and others not. To do so also requires that we think about the role of scholars in performing property, for good or bad, into being.