Legal Geographies

Question 1

Spatialization

Answer 1

• Spatialization is the spatial forms that social activities and material things, phenomena or
  processes take on in geography, sociology, urban planning and cultural studies.
• Generally, the term refers to an overall sense of social space typical of a time, place or culture.

3 forms: the frontier, the survey, and
the grid
- related to social relations

Question 2

Ownership/private property rights

Answer 2

• Land ownership is thus figured as reducible to facts and figures, a conception that inevitably undermines the matrix of duties and responsibilities that had previously been seen to define the manorial community. In the perception of the surveyor, the land is defined as property, as the landlord’s ‘‘own.’’
• Colonialism also marked the creation of new spaces of property. In a few short decades, the geographies of property underwent a fundamental redrawing, as the systems of land ownership of the various First Nations who had used and settled the area were obliterated and subdivided by European settlers.
• The violences of property are not
  confined to displacement. New modalities of policing, whether public or private, mobilize the language of ‘‘broken windows’’ ideology, which relies in turn upon
  certain particular understandings of property. Over sixty women, many of them sex-trade workers, are currently
  designated as ‘‘missing’’ from the Downtown Eastside, half of them aboriginal. Many fear that many of these women were murdered. One suspect is currently facing murder charges relating to fifteen of these women. This sexual and racial violence is perhaps also predicated upon phallocentric claims to the ownership of women’s bodies, especially aboriginal women
• Property’s ‘‘bundle’’ of rights includes the power to exclude others, to use, and to transfer.

Question 3

Ownership model

Answer 3

• Mental structure of property rights
• No one can take your property without permission
• Property is a way of organizing social relations because the state can be neutral
• Assumes unitary, solitary, and identifiable owner → properties are separated by boundaries
• All land is categorized (Private/public)
• This model gives us a way to understand space → categorizing it
• What property is and what it ought to be → who the property belongs to and what rights does the owner have ?
• Property performs a political function → creates freedom/liberty (Lockes freedom through
  property)
• Power allocated through property appears to have an independent, non statelike quality
• Ownership model = spatial model (performative production of space, ownership model requires
  space)
• Blomley: Property isn’t just a thing its a relation → social relations ex. “This land here is mine”
• Aspects of property damage

Question 4

Spatial regulation

Answer 4

• Cities with tourist zones, policing agents in capital cities endeavor to remove homeless people from public streets and create an orderly aesthetic. Such regulation targets bodies deemed odious to the “theme-park” aesthetic of tourist zones
• beautification
• Regulation also aims to “conserve” spaces for expressions of nationalism and engender them with a timeless quality.
• There are several ways of conceiving of spatial regulation of homeless people, including revanchism annihilation by law and banishment
• Banishment, dispersal, exclusion

Question 5

Dispersal

Answer 5

• Not a permanent exclusion
• Dispersal of homeless people from NCC land is not primarily oriented toward punishment or permanent removal
• As a way of refining what we mean by dispersal, we assess the specific regulations that NCC conservation officers use to regulate homeless people
• NCC officers: discursively position
  homeless people as garbage and policing work as cleaning; target homeless people in Ottawa with a sense of immediacy at certain times; and how they cooperate
  with other public and private policing agents.
• We assert that the dispersal of homeless people coheres with a lack of conservation officer accountability. - Dispersal powers are unofficial and stem from the ambiguity of law during enforcement rather than the specificity of law’s content
• Dispersal temporarily removes homeless people judged to lack aesthetic value