Abstract
The contribution of socio-legal studies to urban theory has tended to be somewhat unacknowledged in interdisciplinary debates. These tend to be dominated by sociologists and geographers, and, to a lesser extent, economists and political scientists. Yet some of the sharpest interventions within debates concerning the regulation and planning of the contemporary city have, in recent years, emanated from scholars exploring the role of property law in upholding patterns of land use. Important works including Nick Blomley’s (2010) Rights of Passage, Mariana Valverde’s (2012) Everyday Law on the Street, and John Page’s (2020) Public Property, Law and Society have, in different ways, shown how notions of public and private space in our cities are propped up by informal assumptions of ownership as much as by formal property rights. Unpicking the idea of property and conceptualizing it as a social relationship—rather than simply a legal category—is then revealing of the way that law and place are spliced together to construct social and spatial norms in the city.
Amelia Thorpe’s book represents a timely intervention in these debates, one that illuminates the lawscape of the city by focusing on questions of the ownership of the city’s streets. The book focuses on PARK(ing) days, initiatives involving the temporary take-up of metered road spaces for the purposes of constructing short-lived pocket (or handkerchief) parks in cities otherwise starved of meaningful convivial spaces. Beginning in San Francisco in 2005, the PARK(ing) initiative has spread to an international range of cities, with Thorpe profiling Montreal and Sydney in particular. Effectively reclaiming the streets from the motor car, PARK(ing) days represent a tactical intervention in the fabric of the city where participants use relatively affordable street furniture (a roll of artificial lawn, some deckchairs, or a planter) to challenge the dominance of private automobiles in public spaces. These spaces are then co-opted for activities such as community picnics, health advice sessions, keep fit classes, or book groups. These protests against the normalization of automobility are then highly symbolic in cities where the public realm is often carved up into commoditized parking spaces rather than being left as a place of meaningful public assembly and playful conviviality.
As a form of street politics, PARK(ing) provides an interesting lens through which to explore questions of the right to the city. At present, there are many uncritical accounts which bequeath street claiming and “reclaim the streets” protests with an almost magical ability to transform the city into an urban commons. In contrast, Thorpe displays a critical ambivalence toward PARK(ing) days, noting that while these can work to democratic ends, involving a claim to space rooted in notions of use value rather than the logics of capitalist exchange, they also represent a DIY intervention that can be implicated in gentrification and forms of “hipster urbanism” that generate cultural capital. Nor, as she notes, do they necessarily challenge the commodification of public space: the meter is paid in most cases, with the payment of the charge providing the basis of a claim that the use of the space is legal. Indeed, the meter is central to Thorpe’s socio-legal analysis given that it justifies a privatized and individualized approach to urban property rights, ignoring the fact that democratically elected officials have previously decided the space is best suited to car parking rather than using it for other purposes which might have been decided through less-than-democratic and even exclusionary processes.
Thorpe then concludes that the models of ownership PARK(ing) days sustain are dependent on the particular circumstances of individual parks. She further argues that varied reactions to it suggest there is the potential for it to be transformative, contributing to new legal frameworks that facilitate temporary interventions in public spaces (such as the type of urban experiments attempted in some cities under COVID-19 lockdowns, designed to facilitate social distancing via road closure). This conclusion—that law is not just constraining, but potentially enabling—is an important one in the context of writing on power and participation in urban life. Rather than just viewing the law as aligned with middle class interests and the corporations who have most of the power in cities, Thorpe’s critical analysis shows that understandings of legality can also open new perspectives on the regulation of the built environment and point to productive engagements with municipal law.
Owning the Street is then an exemplary socio-legal analysis of urban democracy in action, and one that deserves to be read by all with more than a passing interest in the politics of public space. The book benefits from a lightness of touch, not becoming bogged down in case law and statute but combining documentary analysis with lively first-hand ethnography and interviews which reveal the quotidian life of law on the street. Always attuned to the micro-geographies of place, and lavishly illustrated too, this is an accessible and timely illustration of the value of legal perspectives in contemporary urban studies.