Sig Langegger

• MURP, PhD
• Professor at Akita International University

This book examines the roles that public space plays in gentrification. Considering both cultural norms of public behavior and the municipal regulation of behavior in public, it shows how commonplace acts in everyday public spaces like sidewalks, streets, and parks work to establish neighborhood legitimacy for newcomers while delegitimizing once au...

This essay can be read as both a tragedy of neoliberal governance and a paean to the resilience and creativity of humanity. Reporting an ethnographic assessment of the impacts of Denver's recent camping ban on homeless communities, I build on John Searle's constructivist social theory to argue not only that undomiciled people construct homes, but a...

The city of Denver, Colorado recently outlawed camping in all open space. Part of a broad effort to accelerate the profit potential of prime urban land through real estate speculation and commerce, the camping ban has dislocated homeless people from the city’s marginal spaces. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Denver, this ar...

As gentrification processes accelerate in American cities, how do newcomers become solidly in-place while longtime residents become hopelessly out-of-place in neighbourhood public spaces? Bringing focus to the often-overlooked public right-of-way – streets, sidewalks and alleys – I examine social rhythms comprising this network of public spaces whe...

In Chapter 7, I shift my focus to streets, and unpack the role that lowrider cruising has played in neighborhood change. This public practice, a loud and colorful parade of Latino culture down neighborhood streets, was at the center of a long-running struggle between Latino longtimers and Anglos newcomers for territorial control of North Denver pub...

In Chapter 8, I compare and contrast the design and regulation of four North Denver Parks: Saint Patrick’s Park (a community designed and constructed park), La Raza Park (once the cultural center of North Denver, now a monumental space), a section of Berkeley Park (a soccer field reconfigured as an off-leash dog park), and Sloan’s Lake Park’s inter...

Why is gentrification in the USA so easily represented as a matter of unquestioned consensus? I outline an answer identifying three factors that shape the regulation of public space. The first is the fact that Anglo cultural complexes remain demographically, politically, and economically dominant, leading to assumptions of Anglo privilege in public...

Chapter 5 uses temporality as a conceptual trope to compare and contrast Anglo and Latino cultural complexes. Focused on temporary use of a variety of locations, this chapter describes and connects many trajectories of neighborhood change. I counterpoise Anglo and Latino interpretations of church festivals. In the same vein I illustrate the contras...

In Chapter. 6, I discuss another type of publicly accessible space, sidewalks and the common practice of public walking in urban neighborhoods. I foreground two types of sidewalk users. A discussion of dog-walking pivots on the profound sense of neighborhood legitimacy that “walking the dog” engenders for many newcomers. The second group of pedestr...

Chapter 4 deconstructs legally vacant spaces upon which two community gardens are sited: the “Troy” Chavez Memorial Peace Garden and the Pecos Garden. I use this chapter to encapsulate how belonging to a culture and belonging (or, as the case may be, not belonging) within a specific geography combine to advance or to stem gentrification. The story...

In Chapter 3 I develop the concepts of belonging and primitive property. I understand belonging as working in two ways. The first way is subject–object belonging, upon which standard ownership models are based: subjects possess objects. The second way is part-whole belonging: people are part of their culture, therefore they belong to it. Using this...

This chapter constitutes one of the theoretical cores of this book. In this chapter, using the concepts of locality, place, and territory, I construct a theory of the dialogical production of space. I then link the production of space to my concept of the rights-rift—the tension created by the friction between what feels right in doing and what one...

Chapter 1 limns a brief history of Denver, describing a century of ethno-racial neighborhood change in a city that emerged from boom and bust mining and railroad expansion industries in the late nineteenth century. As it grew from a trading post into a city, unregulated profiteering, brutal labor conditions in mining, smelting, and meatpacking indu...

This article orbits two mandated mobilities: moving on and finding shelter – one continual and one oriented toward confinement. Reporting ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Denver, a city that recently outlawed camping in all open space, this article builds a model of spatial confinement. The article argues that, in concert with other...

Objective: We sought to describe an emerging drug use pattern characterized by injection of both methamphetamine and heroin. We examined differences in drug injection patterns by demographics, injection behaviors, HIV and HCV status, and overdose. Methods: Persons who inject drugs (PWID) were recruited as part of the National HIV Behavioral Surv...

Sarah Keenan opens her book with a case study centered on Prossy Kakooza, a lesbian asylum seeker: thus she establishes early on that she will be exploring the notion of property using a different set of lenses than those used by most theorists grappling with the complexities of possessing and regulating a valued resource. Rather than extending tra...

Why garden? Why go for a walk? Why own a dog? When does soccer season officially end? While conducting my ethnography, both neighborhood newcomers and long-time residents of North Denver’s rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of Highland and Berkeley asked me these questions. By no means naïve or off-topic, their inquiries cast light on the complex pr...

Today North Denver neighborhoods are gentrifying rapidly. In 2006 the completion of a pedestrian bridge across Interstate 25 connected Highland, a heretofore-isolated North Denver barrio, to Lower Downtown. In a sense, this award-winning span completed the Northside’s now pedestrian/bicycle-friendly streets. These streets currently play a critical...

A social product emerging on public property, public space is produced by a diversity of actors pursuing multiple personal interests. Physical, social, and legal geographies impact who is present, when they are there, and what they do while occupying public property. The relatively recent manifestation of racially, ethnically, socially, and cultura...

From a homeless person's perspective, the neoliberal city seems like a virtual minimum-security prison. In order to work, eat and rest, they must negotiate multiple and layered ordinances regulating their activity and movement. For the homeless, simply occupying public space is already problematic. Certain municipalities allow begging, others do no...

On May 14, 2012, camping became illegal in Denver, Colorado. Over the past 25 years, the development of downtown Denver followed identifiable patterns of neoliberal governance. Single room occupancy hotels were upgraded into “loft-living” condos, rundown streetscapes were intensely policed then trendified, a major downtown street was pedestrianized...

Challenging Loic Waquant’s stance that neoliberalism operates as a monolithic force, restructuring economies and penetrating lived spaces, Jamie Peck and Robert Fairbanks use the term mongrel to capture the unexpected and often contradictory aspects of neoliberalism as it is experienced on the street. Picking up this thread, we carve out a specific...

On May 14, 2012, homelessness became illegal in Denver. Late in 2011, conservative politicians and downtown businesses, succeeded in introducing legislation outlawing public camping—“sleeping in public with any sort of protection against the elements”. Lauded in the press as both a novel reclaiming of public space for the public and as a compassion...

People reside in homes; however, they live in neighbourhoods comprised of parks, sidewalks, restaurants, shops and other everyday places. Whether current or potential neighbourhood residents feel at home in these places remains an undertheorised aspect of neighbourhood change. Rather than housing policy or real estate development, this essay explor...

Chengzhongcun (literally: villages within the city) have been fascinating urban scholars since their unexpected and informal development toward the end of the 20th century throughout a rapidly urbanizing China. Unique to China, Chengzhongcun are literally rural villages engulfed by rapidly sprawling metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai. Interesti...

The revitalization of distressed neighborhoods often disproportionately and negatively affects longtime residents of these urban areas. Not only do revitalization polices displace some residents from their residences, in surprising ways, well-intentioned planning and policy-making may also dislocate long-timer cultures from a neighborhood’s everyda...

Political economy gentrification literature tends to limn a certain inevitability to the trajectories of neighborhood change in terms of urban and housing economics, the fluidity of capital and growth machine politics. On the other hand, public space literature is wrought with notions of the publicness of public space, of diversity, of conflict and...

Vacant lots present city managers and neighborhood residents with myriad problems. They are often trash strewn, tangible signs of neighborhood decay, and thus negatively affect the assessed values of adjacent properties. Additionally, they often serve as locations for dangerous or illicit activities. As part of neighborhood revitalization strategie...

Community gardens no matter their character, irrespective of how long they have been established or the meanings gardeners and neighbors attach to them, have one thing in common. They are almost always considered to be temporary uses of vacant land by urban planners. As such, they occupy precarious conceptual spaces between the purviews of develope...

Vacant lots present city managers and neighborhood residents with many unsavory problems. They are often trash strewn, tangible signs of neighborhood decay. By negatively affecting the assessed values of adjacent properties they delimit property tax revenues collected from large swaths of urban land. Additionally, they often serve as locations for...

Similar to its use in medicine, where heterotopia denotes a thing out of place, so too in discourses centered on urban space, does spatial dislocation form a fundamental core of its definition. However, heterotopias present far more complex spatial problems than the simple transposition or transgression of physical boundaries. They are at once phys...

This report describes methods and findings from an analysis of public comments received by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in response to the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR). This project is an exploration of alternative methods for analyzing public comments, looking beyond the specific requireme...