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Pop-Up Property: Enacting Ownership from San Francisco to Sydney

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Amelia Thorpe
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Abstract

Through a detailed examination of PARK(ing) Day, a loosely organized international event to reclaim street space from cars, this article reveals the intimate connection between property and its social and material context. Private claims to public streets are not uncommon. In some cases, such claims are swiftly rejected. In others, they receive recognition and respect. Focusing on the particular set of proprietary claims within PARK(ing) Day, this article examines the ways in which property on city streets is claimed and contested. Drawing primarily on fieldwork in Sydney, Australia, the analysis emphasizes the degree to which property depends on the networks in which it is situated. PARK(ing) Day was based on a creative rereading of the property producible by paying a parking meter, and this link with legality plays a key role in the event. Yet the property at issue is based on much more than that simple transaction. A more emergent and socially constructed conception of ownership is central in understanding both the making of claims to city streets on PARK(ing) Day and the range of responses they generate.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 740 - 772
Copyright
© 2018 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

Early drafts of this article were greatly improved, thanks to generous feedback from Hanoch Dagan, Eric Feldman, Doug Harris, Stewart Macaulay, Desmond Manderson, Bronwen Morgan, and the anonymous reviewers, as well as discussion at the Penn-Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum in 2016 and the Property in the City workshop at the University of British Columbia in 2017.

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