Adverse commoning: Tracing contested legal geographies of the urban commons

Abstract

Under threat of enclosure in rapidly gentrifying cities, some urban commoners are turning to legal tactics to ward off dispossession. In this article, I explore the contested legal geographies of urban commoning, considering some of the challenges, stakes, and opportunities that emerge in the effort to gain legal recognition. Specifically, I examine the use of the doctrine of adverse possession by Philadelphia gardeners to claim title to the community farm they cultivated as an urban commons for decades. In the context of a neoliberal settler colonial city, I argue that the gardeners’ adverse commoning, involving an il/legal counterclaim to property, facilitates consideration of the ways urban commoners are both enrolled in normative property regimes and have the potential to resist these regimes through errant performances of proprietary continuity, exclusivity, notoriety, and hostility.

Children's Legal Geographies, and the “Make-Believe” of Property

“…(1990; 172) A related task is to be mindful of what children communicate to us about the world through their repetitive inquiries and boundary crossings-what can we learn from as well as teach children. This can expand to attention to the boundary crossing of more-than-human natures, such as wildlife (Bradshaw, 2020), rivers (Blomley, 2008), plants (Fiege, 2005;Noterman, 2022a), and dust (Noterman, 2022b), and how these crossings again underline the fictions of the boundary and suggest other possibilities for organizing space. What if the possibilities for the use of a wall were only limited by our imaginations?…”

The Uncommonness of Urban Commons in Central and Eastern European Countries

“…Finally, crosscutting to the four internal dimensions, is that UC suffer from a lack of agreement and attention as a legal concept (Noterman, 2022;Marella, 2017;Łapniewska, 2017;Foster and Iaione, 2016). Commons did/do exist in law -statutory and customary laws -but "given the persistent dominance of the individual-based property paradigm, the legitimacy of the commons on legal grounds remains problematic" (Marella, 2017, p. 61).…”

Urban vacancy in Europe: A synthetic review and research agenda

“…As the authors argue, this may delay regeneration activity, as landowners may hold on to unrealistic expectations of land value and/or keep brownfield land o; the market based on the belief that its value will increase in the future, thus contributing to long-term vacancy. Related to this, others have argued that the globalization and financialization of real estate markets has brought locally available land and property into wider dynamics of speculation, contributing to the development of vacant spaces by 'abstracting the materiality of property and projecting prospective economic value onto "empty" landscapes, therein vacating present-past space-times in the service of possible capitalrich futures'(Noterman 2022). However, in periods of crisis and property crashes, we can also observe how these 'speculative futures' actively create the very ruins and abandoned sites they claim to want to develop(O'Callaghan, Di Feliciantonio, and Byrne 2018).…”