Nicholas Blomley: Property, Space and Spatial Justice in the City

Nicholas Blomley is the Canadian geographer, a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, whose work shows that property is not a natural fact but a spatial practice that decides who may be in which place, and that spatial justice therefore requires questioning it. In Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property (2004) he analysed how private property was imposed in Vancouver on unceded Indigenous land and on the collective uses of poor neighbourhoods, and in Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow (2011) he showed how the apparent neutrality of the sidewalk, managed as a channel of circulation, expels those who stop, sell, protest or sleep on it.

Legal geography: law produces space

His starting point is legal geography. Law, Blomley argues, produces space: property lines, bylaws and evictions draw the city as much as architects do, and present as technical and neutral a distribution of power. Private property is narrated as an absolute right of the owner against all, but that narrative hides that urban property is always entangled with others' claims: tenants, neighbours who use a lot as a garden, Indigenous peoples whose territory was taken, homeless people who live on the street. Unmasking that narrative is the first step toward redistributing space.

Vancouver: unceded land, Woodward's and the Downtown Eastside

Vancouver is his laboratory. The city stands on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations, and Blomley reconstructs how the colonial survey turned that land into saleable lots and how Indigenous claims have put titles back into question. In the Downtown Eastside, Canada's poorest neighbourhood, he followed the occupation of the Woodward's building in 2002, through which activists and homeless people demanded social housing against gentrification, and the community gardens and single-room hotels that residents defend as de facto collective property. The city, he shows, is full of contested properties.

Rights of Passage: the sidewalk as flow and exclusion by neutrality

Rights of Passage takes the analysis to the sidewalk. Engineers and bylaws conceive pedestrian space as a flow that must be kept free of obstacles, a logic Blomley calls pedestrianism, and in its name begging, street vending, protest and sleeping rough are regulated: British Columbia's Safe Streets Act of 2004 or the sit-lie ordinances of American cities do not prohibit being poor, but occupying space in a way that interrupts circulation. Apparent technical neutrality is the most effective form of exclusion, because it never has to name whom it excludes.

Pluralising property: commons, land trusts and staying

His work converses with the spatial justice of Edward Soja and David Harvey and the legal geography of David Delaney, and has influenced studies on the criminalisation of poverty, urban commons and urban Indigenous rights. Blomley does not propose abolishing property but pluralising it: recognising that in every place rights of different holders coexist, formalising collective uses, community land trusts, cooperatives, gardens, and designing sidewalks and squares for staying and not only for passing. His most recent book, Territory (2023), extends that gaze to the way power is exercised by bounding space.

Blomley's lesson is that spatial justice begins by asking whose each metre of the city is and why. Evictions, gentrification and the cleansing of public space are justified by invoking property rights that seem beyond question, and showing them as historical, reversible decisions opens the possibility of a city where the right to be there does not depend on holding title. Property, in his reading, is a verb before a noun: something that is done and can be done differently.