Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property

How is the legal conception of ‘property’ working to eradicate the global urban commons? Contemporary capitalism has advanced this process by producing rampant gentrification, socio-spatial stratification, and racial inequality. In Unsettling the City , Nicholas Blomley shows how the concept of ‘property’ helps to generate and underwrite these pervasive urban processes. But they are not uncontested. Showing how conflicting concepts of property are implicated in a host of social struggles in the contemporary city, he begins his study with the Pacific Northwest. From this base, Blomley moves to Pacific Rim cities in general, looking at gentrification, urban land, and postcolonialism in the Western US, Australia, and Western Canada - areas where one can see the stark collision between Western, neoliberal notions of property and the more egalitarian, communal view espoused by recently displaced (yet still present) native cultures. Unsettling the City is an expansive analysis of how property plays a key role in what he terms the enclosure of the global commons, and what can be done to resist this process of enclosure.