Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializationsFnotably those of the frontier, the survey, and the gridFplay 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.

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Although considerable research has been conducted into the dynamics of commons in rural settings, we still know very little about common property within cities. Given the hegemony of certain models of property, the urban commons has been overlooked and ignored. Urban commons do not look like property to us. This can lead, I argue, to real injustice. Based, in part, on empirical research in Vancouver, I attempt to map out the urban commons of the poor, particularly in relation to the dynamics of innercity gentrification. This commons, produced through intensive patterns of use and collective habitation, is fiercely moral, reliant upon political claims and the exclusion of interests that threaten enclosure. For inner-city activists contesting displacement, the commons is real. As such, gentrification, and related dynamics, can usefully be thought of as forms of enclosure, or what David Harvey terms 'dispossession by accumulation'. I conclude by asking what urban policy, political praxis and property theory might look like if they acknowledged the collective property interest of the poor in the inner-city commons. KEY WORDS activism; collective habitation; enclosure; exclusion; local communities; urban commons 'Before we can reclaim the commons we have to remember how to see it.' (Rowe, 2001) SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES

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Analyses of enclosure in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England have tended to focus on the social work of representations, in particular estate maps.