
Nicholas BlomleySimon Fraser University · Department of Geography
Nicholas Blomley
Ph.D.
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September 1989 - present
Publications
Publications (116)
Precariously homed people do not control the spaces they call home. As a result, their belongings are governed by the actions of people granted greater legal powers. To fully understand the practice and effects of such regulations requires a community-engaged research methodology. In this paper, we focus on Abbotsford, in British Columbia, Canada,...
Legal geographic research is a heterogeneous and lively academic field that, for decades now, has offered a wide array of critiques to hegemonic takes on ‘law’, ‘space’, and ‘power’, and the relation among them. Nonetheless, a broader engagement with legal geographic scholarship beyond the Anglosphere has not been fully embraced. This article intro...
What is a wall to a child? It may be an obstacle course, a balance beam, a “car,” a seat, a home for spiders and ladybugs, a place to play hide and seek, a support to lean on when learning to walk, a perch for cats, a musical instrument to be played with sticks and hands. Rather than just a barrier, the wall can also become an incitement to explore...
This paper documents court-imposed bail and sentencing conditions with spatial dimensions, such as red zones, no contact conditions, curfews, and prohibitions to demonstrate, issued in the context of criminal proceedings. These conditional orders, which are growing in importance and have a significant impact on the lives of marginalized people, hav...
Drawing from community‐based research in the Downtown Eastside, the poorest part of Vancouver, Canada, a neighbourhood long demonized as an ‘outlaw zone’, we suggest that what may appear to be illegal property practices in the area's infamous Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels are, in fact, harder to detach from formal legality than supposed. We ch...
Precariously housed people face serious challenges in securing their personal possessions from the actions of both private and public actors. This is despite evidence of widespread destruction, seizure, and theft; associated violations of equality and dignity rights; the significance of the belongings to their owners; and the heightened vulnerabili...
Cambridge Core - Socio-Legal Studies - Red Zones - by Marie-Eve Sylvestre
In Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley and Céline Bellot examine the court-imposed territorial restrictions and other bail and sentencing conditions that are increasingly issued in the context of criminal proceedings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with legal actors in the criminal justice system, as well as those who have been subject...
Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive...
Rapport de recherche sur les conditions géographiques imposées lors de la mise en liberté et à la peine à des personnes marginalisées qui utilisent les espaces publics à Montréal. Basé sur un travail de terrain effectué entre 2013 et 2015 à Montréal y compris des entretiens auprès de personnes judiciarisées et d'acteurs judiciaires et une analyse d...
Au cours des dernières décennies, les espaces publics se sont refermés sur les manifestants et les dissidents politiques. Que ce soit par des techniques policières de contrôle des foules, des arrestations de masse ou par l’adoption de règlements visant à encadrer le droit de manifester, ces personnes sont des plus en plus nombreuses à être prises e...
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report provides findings on a research project focused on conditions of release with spatial dimensions, such as area restrictions or ‘red zones’, no go orders, no contact, non-association and residential conditions, and curfews, imposed at the bail or at sentencing stages to marginalized groups of people, including the home...
Notre système de mise en liberté provisoire a un urgent besoin de réforme. Contrairement à l’esprit de la réforme de 1972 qui faisait de la liberté inconditionnelle sa raison d’être, les acteurs judiciaires font un usage excessif de la détention préventive et ont recours de façon généralisée à des conditions restrictives de liberté trop souvent dér...
To understand the crucial work of property in land in enforcing and sustaining relationships of power between people, it is necessary to analyse the particular manner in which property became territorialized. I focus here on one crucial moment in which this occurred – the reconception of the space of landed property in seventeenth century rural Eng...
On July 31, 1944, Rikizo Yoneyama, a former resident of Haney, British Columbia, an agricultural area east of Vancouver, wrote to the Canadian Minister of Justice to protest the sale of his property. Two years earlier, when he and his family had packed their belongings for their forced expulsion from coastal British Columbia, they could take with t...
Contemporary land use planning has an ambivalent relationship with private property. While inextricably entangled with private property, planning frequently presents itself as at a remove, such that planning does not appear to regulate property, but rather acts upon “land use.” It is tempting to see land use, therefore, as a means by which planning...
What does the property boundary mean to laypersons? How do everyday geographies of property work? Merrill and Smith offer an influential set of hypotheses concerning the boundary's role in communicating simple messages of exclusion in the everyday world. The first goal of this article is to assess these claims. Drawing from qualitative data on gard...
The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tendency to view territory through the lens of the state. Viewing both property and territory as relational and mutually recursive, I introduce the practical work of property’s territory, the historical moment in which it was produced, the powerful metaphors...
This paper documents court-imposed bail and sentencing conditions with spatial dimensions, such as red zones, no contact conditions, curfews and prohibitions to demonstrate, issued in the context of criminal proceedings. These conditional orders, which are growing in importance and have a significant impact on the lives of marginalized groups of pe...
As human codings of animals are often simultaneously legal and spatial, it may be useful to bring together the animal geographies literature and scholarship on legal geography. Through a case study set in southwest Finland, we explore the emergent and fraught entanglements of wolves, humans and sheep, characterizing the attempts at the regulation o...
The article will overview changing theorizations of the relationships between law and geography, beginning with the 'regional' accounts of the early years of the twentieth century, where laws were seen as structured by geographic and environmental conditions. These are compared with the 'impact analyses' of mid-century, where law was seen as struct...
A draft version of a chapter in an forthcoming book on commons, this paper draws from CB Macpherson's concept of common property as the right to not be excluded in order to make sense of the enduring and heroic struggle against gentrification-induced displacement in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Michel Callon's concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing is the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. It temporarily rearranges the relations that const...
Abstract: A modern day treaty process in British Columbia, Canada, involving First Nations and the federal and provincial governments, entails a struggle to carve out both metaphoric and material space for indigenous land and title. Despite considerable opposition, the state has insisted that First Nations will hold their treaty lands as a form of...
Legal geography takes the reciprocal interconnections between law and spatiality as core objects of inquiry. The introduction explores three broadly sequential modes of legal geographic research. The first mode of legal geography includes disciplinary work in law or geography that is modeled on the conventional image of import and export. The secon...
This chapter draws on American pragmatism, particularly John Dewey's work on habit, to present a careful legal geography of everyday, lived spaces and their effects on action and behavior. The chapter suggests that the concept of habit may be useful in its refusal of dualistic thinking, its emphasis on transaction and event, and its resistance to “...
Abstract: Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that it does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so...
Abstract: Following the call to focus on law as a set of practices, I develop Callon’s concept of framing (which I refer to here as bracketing) in relation to law. Bracketing refers to the process of delimiting a sphere within which interactions take place more or less independently of a surrounding context. To do so is to temporarily rearrange the...
This short piece aims to provoke interest in thinking about the spatial dimensions of property (particularly in land). This reflects the burgeoning interest in the geographies of law more generally. While there are many ways in which one can "think spatially", it is important to begin by noting that "space" itself is capable of at least two meaning...
Property is a crucial means by which space is made, and remade. This is powerfully evident in settler societies, such as British Columbia, Canada. To understand the work that it does requires us to attend to the manner in which it is entangled in and constitutive of a multitude of relations (ethical, practical, historical, semantic and so on). Yet...
Urban geographers would argue that cities are distinct spaces that need to be treated on their own terms. Yet I fear that we have not given the specificity of urban law its due. My aim is to give one crucial, yet easily overlooked urban legal practice, that of "police," more careful attention. By "police" I mean " the regulation of the internal lif...
Scholars under the ‘Progressive Property’ banner distinguish between dominant conceptions of property, and its underlying realities. The former, exemplified by Singer’s ‘ownership model’, is said to misdescribe extant forms of ownership and misrepresent our actual moral commitments in worrisome ways. Put simply, it is argued that our representation...
Scholars under the ‘Progressive Property’ banner distinguish between dominant conceptions of property, and its underlying realities. The former, exemplified by Singer’s ‘ownership model’, is said to misdescribe extant forms of ownership and misrepresent our actual moral commitments in worrisome ways. Put simply, it is argued that our representation...
A chapter in a forthcoming book on interstices, I consider the way in which a particular scalar logic of jurisdiction militates against an appropriately interstitial understanding of urban law.
I draw from performativity theory in order to understand the process of surveying and its implication in the remaking of property and space in early modern England, drawing in particular on John Norden’s ‘The Surveyor’s Dialogue’ (1607, 1610, 1618). Early modern surveying, I argue, sought to perform property through a series of enrolments and allia...
How is inner city space represented and by whom? Drawing from an extensive framing analysis of print media portrayals of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside between 1996 and 2008, we offer a detailed assessment of the predominately negative portrayal of the neighbourhood, and the centrality of three frames: medicalization, criminalization, and socializat...
Urban geographers would argue that cities are distinct spaces that need to be treated on their own terms. Yet I fear that we have not given the specificity of urban law its due. My aim is to give one crucial, yet easily overlooked urban legal practice – that of ‘police’ – more careful attention. By ‘police’ I mean ‘the regulation of the internal li...
Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow documents a powerful and under-researched form of urban governance that focuses on pedestrian flow. This logic, which Nicholas Blomley terms 'pedestrianism', values public space not in terms of its aesthetic merits, or its success in promoting public citizenship and democracy. Rather, t...
Scholars of public space criticize regulation governing the behaviour of the public poor for both its illiberal effects and motivations. The arguments used to justify such regulation are frequently characterized as a smokescreen that conceal more sinister agendas, and are thus often overlooked by critics. But to fail to take such arguments seriousl...
How is property geographical? The making of liberal property, I argue, relies upon a topographical logic, premised on the production of bounded, coherent spaces, through which the individuated subjects and objects of property can be rendered legible. Such a spatialization helps sustain the territorialization of property, in which the government of...
For anyone who has looked at a map of the United States and wondered how Texas and Oklahoma got their Panhandles, or flown over the American heartland and marveled at the vast grid spreading out in all directions below, American Boundaries will yield a welcome treasure trove of insight. The first book to chart the countryâs growth using the bound...
Scholars of public space and law criticize regulation that governs the behaviour of the public poor for both its illiberal effects and motivations. The arguments used to justify such regulation are frequently characterized as a smokescreen, concealing hidden agendas, and are thus often overlooked. But to fail to take such arguments seriously, I arg...
Property, the legal relationship between persons in regard to valued resources, is of both analytical and ethical significance to many social issues. Yet homelessness is not often thought of in relation to property. As cities increasingly regulate the behavior of homeless people, such an analysis takes on a heightened urgency. The work of Jeremy Wa...
Haila questions the dominant ‘story’ that ‘imperfections’ in Chinese urban land markets can only be resolved through state sanctioned private property rights. She interrogates the meaning of concepts such as ‘market’ or ‘property’, wary of the ‘ontological fallacy’ in which concepts are confused for real objects. Drawing from Mitchell (1991), we se...
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...
A number of scholars have criticized the ways in which property law simplifies nature. Such reductive simplifications are seen as being reliant upon a claim to mastery and dominion that is belied by the essential complexity and dynamism of the natural world. Drawing from a close reading of a property-boundary dispute involving the historical moveme...
Inspired by some important inter-disciplinary work in both legal studies and human geography, I explore the vision of geography - with special reference to the theorization of mobility - that appears to be expressed within mainstream legal discourse. I argue that the legal account is premised on the privileging of certain components of liberal thou...
For some observers, liberal rights are politically disempowering, while for others they can provide a basis for mobilization, resistance and the formation of counter-publics. Yet neither of these claims says much about the geography of rights, which provides the focus for our discussion. Rights are geographical in several senses: rights are often a...
Considers the role of the law courts in the determination of legal meaning. Given a complex and potentially vulnerable role, the law courts adopt a number of formalised procedures, seeking to distance themselves as an interpretive institution from a ruling. Far from acting as a higher, depersonalised moral arbiter, the law court is deeply implicate...
Résumé
En dépit de divergences idéologiques, les travaux savants sur l'espace public entendu comme site de rencontre entre les gens ont eu tendance à se centrer sur ses aspects éthiques et politiques. Cela s'est fait au détriment de ce que l'auteur nomme «la logique de circulation», une perspective envahissante de l'espace public qui fait valoir le...
A review of recent Canadian case law on the constitutionality of legal controls on begging reveals the importance of an unacknowledged view of space and behaviour that I call the traffic code. The paper endeavours to take this code seriously, unpacking its logic and scope. In particular, it explores its legal effects, noting that it deflects rights...
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. I depart from this emphasis, however, in my attempt to focus on the consequential and often contradictory role of material objects in producing enclosure. In particular, I emphasise the...
In the Susette Kelo et al. v. City of New London, Connecticut, et al. decision of 2005, a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of eminent domain by the New London Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization charged with redeveloping a depressed site in New London, Connecticut, was not a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which...
The scholarly analysis of public space, despite ideological differences, has tended to focus on the political and ethical dimensions of public space, construed as a site for encounters between people. This has been at the expense of what the author terms the “traffic logic,” a pervasive administrative view of public space that emphasizes pedestrian...
A dominant characterization celebrates property as a means to attain privacy and autonomy. Drawing on recent scholarship, I compare this idea with a proprietarian perspective, which emphasizes the ways in which private ownership comes freighted with public responsibilities. The garden, I shall argue, reveals both dimensions to property. Drawing fro...
Legal spaces are said to be a crucial materialization of law, serving to communicate legal meaning and, in so doing, helping to produce a liberal–legal consciousness. Given its centrality to legal ordering and liberal ideology, the spatial manifestation of the public–private divide, especially when related to property, would appear to be particular...
Many contemporary neo-liberal urban programs are enacted in order to protect private property, structured according to a logic of property, or designed to extend the workings of private property to public domains. My focus is on the latter, especially in relation to the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). Here, resi...
Beatrix Potter's classic children's book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, offers an example of a well-entrenched view of property and its geographies. Drawing on this, and current scholarship on law and geography, I explore the ways in which the spatial boundaries of property are formally conceived. I then compare this model with the findings of a qualit...
Physical violence, whether realized or implied, is important to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of a Western property regime. Certain spatializations—notably those of the frontier, the survey, and the grid—play a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, I argue, are reproduced through various enactme...
Because there is little literature about how law and space may be related, this has led to the notion that these two concepts should be separate from each other. However, there have been some notions that demonstrate how law is concerned with space and geography. Also, this chapter realises that both respects have embraced the notion of hybridity s...
Short and accessible, this book interweaves a discussion of the geography of property in one global city, Vancouver, with a more general analysis of property, politics, and the city.
Public Culture 14.3 (2002) 557-582
Besides the conventional financial and technical requirements, the typical property leasing agreement often includes the provision that a tenant be assured of the "quiet enjoyment of the land." The term quiet, apparently, refers not to protection from excess noise but an assurance that the tenant can enjoy his or...
If we want to make sense of the historical geographies of a city like Vancouver (and many western North American cities), we would do well to look at the workings of property relations, particularly as they relate to land. As geographers, we have tended to focus on the economic dimensions of property, to the neglect of its legal and political dimen...
If we want to explore the social dimensions of property, we need to think of it not only historically but also geographically, entailing both practices in and representations of social space. The concept of landscape is a useful bridging device here, given its double meaning as both a material space and as a particular way of seeing space. Landscap...