Nicholas Blomley

Nicholas Blomley, professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is the founder, with David Delaney and Richard Ford, of legal geography, the field that studies how law produces space and space produces law. His starting point, in Law, Space, and the Geographies of Power (1994), was that legal categories, property, jurisdiction, public order, do not float above the city but organise it physically.

Unsettling the City (2004) is his most cited work. It studies Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighbourhood in Canada, and shows that two conflicts that seem different, gentrification and Indigenous land claims, arise from the same conception of property as an owner's absolute right, and that against it there exist forms of collective property and use that the city does not recognise but that give meaning to the life of a neighbourhood.

Rights of Passage (2011), which won the Hart Socio-Legal Studies Association book prize, uncovers an almost invisible logic of government: pedestrianism, the idea that the sidewalk is above all a channel of circulation, which justifies expelling vendors, beggars and demonstrators without needing to forbid anything, only with the engineering of flow. Territory (2022) generalises that gaze to the idea of territory. His work is one of the foundations of the critique of hostile design and of the privatisation of public space.