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

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12347
• Published date: 01 September 2018
• Date: 01 September 2018

Pop-Up Property: Enacting Ownership from San

Francisco to Sydney

Amelia Thorpe

Through a detailed examination of PARK(ing) Day, a loosely organized inter-

national 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 legal-

ity 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.

Private claims over public streets have long histories. Such

claims are often rejected, with officials and/or members of the

local community acting to enforce the public nature of the street.

The parking of camper vans in kerbside spaces by backpackers in

Sydney, Australia, for example, has drawn heated responses in

recent years. Residents living near beaches and inner city parks

have objected strongly, prompting media reports of a “plague”

and “grubby hippies setting up camp” (Daily Telegraph 2016).

Local residents and businesses lobbied municipal authorities to

prevent backpackers using streets in this way. While the use of

parking spaces to stay overnight is often not illegal, complaints

from locals have been successful in prompting the introduction of

new regulatory restrictions that do in fact prohibit it

(McKenny 2014).

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 work-

shop at the University of British Columbia in 2017.

Please direct all correspondence to Amelia Thorpe, Faculty of Law, UNSW Australia,

Sydney,NSW 2052; e-mail: a.thorpe@unsw.edu.au

Law & Society Review, Volume 52, Number 3 (2018)

©2018 Law and Society Association. All rights reserved.

740

Food trucks are another contentious example. In many cities

around the world, food vendors operating out of vehicles parked

on city streets have attracted hostile responses, largely from “brick

and mortar” restaurants (Lasserre 2013; Mukhija and Loukaitou-

Sideris 2014). In Sydney, concerns raised by restaurants and

others led to the inclusion of strict controls governing the intro-

duction of food trucks in 2012 (Zegura 2014). Yet, businesses and

neighboring residents continue to complain about noise, nuisance,

and unfair competition for established businesses (Di Lizia 2013).

In other cases, private uses of public streets attract far less oppo-

sition. As several scholars have noted, the digging out and claiming

of parking spaces for the duration of a snowy North American win-

ter by local residents is widely recognized as legitimate by others in

the community (Epstein 2002; Rose 1985; Silbey 2010). A range of

other private activities on public streets are similarly accepted in a

number of cities: the use by cafes and restaurants of on-street park-

ing spaces for outdoor seating and the use by homeowners and

businesses of such spaces for the storage of refuse containers and

other equipment during construction or for commercial and private

loading and unloadingover shorter periods. Many of these activities

are subject to permitting processes,and that legal status is important

to their acceptance by the wider community.

Yet, there is more at stake than permits and regulations. With

respect to the well-documented claiming of snow-cleared parking

spaces, the particular regulations in operation are often not deter-

minative of how officials or others respond. In many cities, the

placing of chairs and other objects to claim a parking space is ille-

gal (either specifically proscribed or as part of a more general pro-

hibition on the placement of private objects on public roads), yet

officials often tolerate the practice (Silbey 2010). Efforts to enforce

laws prohibiting the activity may even generate fervent resistance.

As many commentators have noted, the enforcement of the laws

regulating streets and public spaces is replete with variation

(Blomley 2011; Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht 2009; Valverde

2012). Official responses are influenced to a large degree by factors

other than legal rules, and this is by no means a new occurrence. In

her discussion of obstruction of the street, a body of law dating back

to the Middle Ages, Rachel Vorspan notes the very clear influence

of social and political agendas on the way in which laws regulating

public streets have been enforced (Vorspan 1997). In a more recent

discussion of sidewalk vendors in New York, Ryan Devlin explains:

on the street formal law does not act like a blueprint structuring

social action and spatial form; it exists mostly as a point of

departure for spatial negotiations and maneuvers. (Devlin

2011:54)

Thorpe 741

Variability is apparent in each of the examples described

above. Not all camper vans are rejected (a van parked in my own

street in inner Sydney went unchallenged for several months), not

all claims to snow-cleared spaces are accepted (within popular dis-

course on the practice, Susan Silbey and Richard Epstein find

multiple critiques [Epstein 2002; Silbey 2010]), and not all food

trucks are rejected (in Los Angeles, saveourtacotrucks.org details

a range of activities undertaken by supporters of food trucks to

campaign for less restrictive regulations). Patterns of acceptance

cannot be explained simply by reference to legislative provisions

or judicial determinations; that is, to formal law.

Within this variability and maneuverability, there are also con-

sistencies. In trying to understand these, property is important.

Property has long been associated with who and what belongs in a

place and who and what does not (Waldron 2009). Proprietary

claims are central to each of the activities outlined above, and the

ways in which these claims are expressed and received offer impor-

tant insights well beyond the particular disputes in question.

In line with the growing body of scholarship emphasizing the

relationality, complexity, and performativity of property (Blomley

2013; Cooper 2014; Davies 2007; Keenan 2014; Rose 1994), the

property at issue on city streets should be understood as contin-

gent and collectively constructed. My central claim in this article is

that proprietary claims on public streets are most likely to be suc-

cessful when they are grounded in relationships of social and mate-

rial connection to the site in question. I examine this general claim

in the context of a particular set of activities: the construction of

temporary parks around the world each year on PARK(ing) Day.

This focus on grounded empirical work is important. Prop-

erty scholars are increasingly emphasizing the importance of

everyday and lay understandings to the workings of property, yet

there is a lack of empirical work to guide the study of property

practices (Blomley 2016:225). This article helps to fill that gap.

PARK(ing) Day is an annual, global, open-source event in

which participants appropriate parking spaces and temporarily

transform them into spaces that are more sociable and sustain-

able. The event centers on the parking meter: participants pay for

the space, then use it for anything but the parking of cars. Exami-

nation of the claims and counterclaims involved in PARK(ing) Day

demonstrate the extent to which formal and informal understand-

ings of property are entangled and how different understandings

of property shape and are shaped by their social, spatial, and tem-

poral context. While the research is drawn from a larger project

encompassing fieldwork in Montreal, Canada, and San Francisco,

California, I focus here on Sydney, Australia.

742 Pop-Up Property