Figure 5 - uploaded by Luke Bennett
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Source publication
Research on public access to urban green space tends to focus upon access-takers’ motives and meaning-making. The motives and meaning-making of the owners and managers who control such spaces are rarely examined. To address this deficit this article presents a longitudinal case study examining how an owner’s ambivalent stance over public access to...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... haunting 'take care for your children in this place' atmosphere, perpetuated by the signage, may have originally been directed at a tangible hazard (the adventure playground) and attendant anxieties (the moral panic that emerged in the late 1980s about the safety of playgrounds, as chronicled by Ball (2002)) which had made this space then non-standard pub space, and thus a place of focussed concern and careful symbolic management. The sign shown in Figure 5 may therefore represent the 'root' meme (Dawkins, 1989: 192) of this now selfperpetuating semiotic rash, for this (long broken) printed sign suggests a more specific and slightly institutional origin than more recent 'home-made' article offspring subsequently added alongside it. ...
Citations
... Whilst contemporary legal geography retains its concern to identify political or socio-economic power as a key driver in the materialisation of law into space (and thereby its constitutive role in creating places), the pragmatic analytical lens accepts that manifestations of particular types of place may not be driven by traditional models of power or conflict, or even fully conceptualised by their enactor. Thus, the turn to pragmatism, productively opens up scope to think about the local subjectivities and irrationalities of place-formation (Bennett 2019). ...
Whilst contemporary legal geography retains its concern to identify political or socio-economic power as a key driver in the materialisation of law into space (and thereby its constitutive role in creating places), a pragmatic analytical lens accepts that manifestations of particular types of place may not be driven by traditional models of power or conflict, or even fully conceptualised by their enactor. This chapter illustrates and explores this pragmatic perspective, by exploring the way that 'everyday' property law principles and rural land managements practices where co-opted into the creation of a Cold War network of nuclear blast monitoring stations, spread across the UK's hill tops and fields, between 1956 and 1965.
[NB: The chapter can be read for free in full in the publisher's book preview: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781788977197/9781788977197.00010.xml]
... To pursue this analysis, I have considered a variety of outdoor attraction sites in England, drawing across a range of previous studies in order to do so (for details of these, see Bennett, 2019). At these sitesruins, quarries, country parks, cemeteries, urban woodlandthe place-manager is faced with the challenge set by both criminal law (principally the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974) and civil law (the Occupiers Liability Acts of 1957 and 1984). ...
This paper challenges legal geographers to go further in their claimed rejection of legal closure (the reduction of any situation to a purely legal dimension), by calling for greater exploration of how law's command is always acting alongside and potentially subordinated to other spatio‐cultural normative influences. The insights of this advocated approach are illustrated using examples drawn from the author's fieldwork conducted across a variety of outdoor attraction settings, which have explored how place‐managers frame, arrange, and present their sites by reference to individual goals and communal interpretive practices deriving from multiple normative drivers. It is argued that this plurality of influences requires place‐managers to act as edgeworkers, developing a finely tuned understanding of how to manage the potentially hazardous co‐presence of visitors’ bodies and physical edges at their sites. This requires active balancing of their interpretation of (and compliance with) broad commandments for their sites to be ‘reasonably safe’, with the requirements of other pressing normativities, including those set by landscape aesthetics that demand that visitors must be presented with an appropriately thrilling experience. Recent trends in the development of contemporary legal geographic analysis, each of which are suggestive of an increasing attentiveness to law's limits, are considered in order to develop this critique of conventional legal geographic practice and in support of the potentiality of the recommended new focus, specifically: legal geography's ‘contingency orientation’ (Orzeck & Hae); emerging interest in the ‘edge of law’ (Jeffrey); and in the purposeful creation of normative atmospheres and law's dissimulation there (Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos; Pavoni). Through these analytical lenses place‐manager's active and skilful edgework becomes both more visible and more understandable as a dynamic situational balancing of compliance with safety laws and with the satisfaction of thrill and desire. This short paper calls for legal geographers to give more attention to how place‐managers transpose abstract legal requirements onto their sites, and what interpretative and emotional resources they use to do so. It emphasises the importance of other normative drivers, alongside those of law, in the formation and maintenance of places.
Purpose
This account becomes both a theoretical and a methodological exploration of walking with the law; as such the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate how we migh walk in order to attend to how the law makes the built environment possible, how it shapes and creates places to be lived in, visited and experienced and how the law manifests in human encounters and interactions in the everyday life of the city.
Design/methodology/approach
In this study, the authors combine a walking narrative approach with an open-ended interview to raise awareness of the law’s hidden presence in the urban environment. The authors explore the city of Sheffield, in Yorkshire, in the North of England, to learn about its past, regeneration and future development by combining the appreciation of the built environment, as experienced by the senses and movement, with a guided tour.
Findings
This study highlights the interconnectivity of law and place both objectively and subjectively: the authors discuss sensorial experiences of law, and also elaborate on the normativity of law, as manifested in the regulation and the making of urban places in Sheffield.
Originality/value
The originality lies in the combination of methods used to appreciate the manifestation of law in the built environment, comprising interview, autoethnographic elements and walking (multisensory experience).
The constantly shifting boundaries between land and sea pose fundamental challenges in resolving land use disputes at the coast. In the UK, these difficulties are compounded by the fact that multiple agencies and authorities are charged with managing the coastline. This means the coast is a space of legal plurality, subject to overlapping jurisdiction. This paper demonstrates the consequences of this with reference to Whitstable, on the north Kent coast, where customary law and established (‘as of right’) use is clashing with private property rights concerning the ownership of, and access to, a town beach. Noting that the legal authorities are struggling to reconcile these different rights claims, the paper concludes that the effective resolution of land use conflicts on a changing coastline demands legal pliability, and, ideally, a reduction in the overall number of organisations responsible for the regulation of the ‘coastal commons’.
