Shopping in the Public Realm: A Law of Place

Abstract

Through a case study based in Bristol, this article explores how the ‘law of place’ has transformed multiple heterogeneous city centre spaces into a single homogeneous and commodified privately owned retail site. Drawing on de Certeau, Lefebvre, and humanistic geographers including Tuan, the article explores how law facilitates spatial and temporal enclosure through conventional understandings of private property, relying on techniques of masterplanning, compulsory purchase, and stopping up highways. It suggests that the law of place draws on binary spatial and conceptual distinctions to apparently separate places from spaces, applying different legal rules either side of an often invisible boundary line. The article questions this legally facilitated spatial and conceptual enclosure, particularly as it restricts spatial practices within the public realm. It concludes by rejecting an urban ‘right to roam’ as insufficiently transformative, calling for a broader interpretation of Lefebvre's ‘right to the city’ instead.

How does law make place? Localisation, translocalisation and thing-law at the world’s first factory

“…Layard (2010) illustrated her 'law of place' by showing the shaping force of law in the arrangement of a new shopping centre and Silbey and Cavicchi (2005) showed the place-shaping effects of powerful normative conventions governing the composition of a museum. This case study shows such processes to have both order and instability at their heart, each arising and enduring within the complexity of interactions at stake in any localisation of a place-form, and any translocalisation of any originating place.…”

“…This is an axiomatic question for legal geographers, with much work in this hybrid field having focussed upon situations in which the imbrication of law, society and spatiality can be teased out within localised, bounded settings such as streetscapes, fields, zoos, shopping centres and suburbia (Blomley, 2011(Blomley, , 2007Braverman, 2012;Layard, 2010;Butler, 2005). However much of this research has tended to focus upon delineating the spatio-legal control of access to place, rather than upon the processes and actors of place formation and proliferation.…”

Legal geography I

“…'Law' draws lines, constructs insides and outsides, assigns legal meanings to lines, and attaches legal consequences to crossing them. Recent work has investigated the legal constitution of individuated spaces of interdiction (Beckett and Herbert, 2010), therapeutic intervention (Moore et al, 2011), legitimated torture (D'Arcus, 2014), sexual citizenship (Hubbard, 2012), water citizenship (Perramond, 2013), appropriate defecation (Braverman, 2009), cultural protection (Benson, 2012), private governance through emotions (Delaney, 2014), prison visitation (Moran, 2013), and regulated consumption (Layard, 2010). Law as 'rules and rights' underpins spatial tactics such as confinement, exclusion, expulsion, and coerced mobility.…”

‘We do have space in Lausanne. We have a large cemetery’: the non-controversy of a non-existent Muslim burial ground

“…According to Delaney, these contradictions have to be analysed as a whole as 'contests among these nomospheric technicians-or Lefebvrian 'space doctors' who in various ways, small and large, interpretively restructure our lifeworlds' (Delaney 2004: 854). This appeal to analyse quarrels between nomosphere specialists has indeed been echoed in analyses of urban struggles and in Lefebvrian work about law generally (Attoh 2011;Butler 2009), rights to the city (Layard 2010;Valverde 2012) or else the paradox of the new public governance (Swyngedouw 2005). However, Delaney's contribution is to show that nomosphere contestation can also be an essentially internal process of confrontation between various experts, bureaucrats and other urban managers.…”