Abstract
In Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property, Amelia Thorpe traces the rapid rise and spread of a global event taking place on the third Friday in September each year. On Park(ing) Day people transform parking spaces into public parks. In doing so, Thorpe shows us, they also transform their own understandings of property, rights of ownership, and their power to enact change in their communities.
The book traces Park(ing) Day from its origin in a single San Francisco parking space, transformed with Astroturf, a potted tree, and a park bench in 2005. At that time, the art collective Rebar used a creative interpretation of the San Francisco traffic code to pay the parking meter and thereby “lease” the parking space, which they converted into an urban park. The act of paying the meter empowers Park(ing) Day participants, animates their legal tenancy, and legitimates their claim to space. These elements—the meter, the lease, and the claim to right of use—are key to Thorpe’s expansive and impressive analysis of Park(ing) Day as an expression of legal consciousness, legal pluralism, alternative property rights, and the on-the-ground practice of enacting a right to the city.
The book explores the ideological roots, justifications, and aspirations of both key stakeholders and lay participants in the context of the pop-up spaces they create. The book centers both the materiality of Park(ing) Day and the values and aspirations that underlie it. Thorpe brings the study of legal consciousness to the street, literally, to examine this expression of DIY urbanism. As a property scholar, Thorpe is expressly interested in quotidian legal understandings and meaning-making around property rights. Yet her analysis is useful for sociologists, geographers, and planning scholars interested in how residents understand and exercise their right to the city. More importantly, Thorpe extends classic understandings of the “right to the city” by exploring how residents justify their right to transform the city (often with explicit intentions around values of equity, accessibility, and environmentalism).
Throughout, Thorpe offers a masterful review of the literature on property, legal consciousness, prefigurative politics, the right to the city, and commoning. Nearly every page bears useful connections between these various literatures and the efforts of Park(ing) Day enthusiasts. The book’s greatest strength is this engagement with an arc of urban, legal, and social theory from John Locke to Jane Jacobs, all through the lens of property. In this way, Thorpe is among a wave of scholars that are foregrounding property as a critical and productive site for understanding social relations, inequality, and governance.
The book is based on a mixed-method comparative qualitative and ethnographic design. It examines Park(ing) Day alongside participants in three international cities where the event has taken root to various degrees—San Francisco (the birthplace of the event), Montreal, and Sydney. Thorpe is clear that her intent is not to center the comparative aspect of the research, but rather to examine the circulation of cultural ideas about place across a range of different sites. The research is greatly strengthened by this global perspective.
Thorpe conducted 84 semi-structured interviews, which provide the book’s most revealing source of data. Thorpe was able to get impressive access to both participants and founding members of Rebar, the creators of Park(ing) Day. Socio-legal theory is woven into every aspect of the research, including formal and informal conversations. Theoretical insights around place, property, and ownership are crystalized in participants’ own explanations of their experience in producing pop-up parks.
Park(ing) Day is a one-day event. This allows for a neat ethnographic component of the research, one that will likely be informative to students undertaking event-based ethnographic work. Though the ethnographic underpinnings of the research are less explored (and the book lacks a methodological appendix), Thorpe’s participant observation clearly does what it was designed to do—capture the performances and social relations that animate alternative property claims. Thorpe employs what she terms “photo-ethnography” to provide excellent and welcomed photographs of Park(ing) Day installations. As she points out, understanding Park(ing) Day necessitates engagement with its images. This aspect of the research will be useful for students and researchers exploring the use of imagery in ethnography, especially in the study of place.
The joy of Park(ing) Day is evident in participants’ descriptions of the event, in Thorpe’s photos, and in Thorpe’s own writing. “Performing ownership” sparks a range of emotions, including belonging, pride, and joy. Thorpe centers emotion in the experience of transforming the street; emotions are central in transforming “property rights” (conferred by paying the meter) into a “sense of ownership” (sparked by cultivating park space).
In this way, Thorpe brings affect into the study of property. The book sheds light on property as an experience. A “sense of ownership” both draws people to participate in Park(ing) Day and transforms their understanding of their rights and their investments in their cities afterward. Park(ing) Day participants often begin discussing their participation in terms of community and connection, but Thorpe shows how time and again they shift to a language of ownership. This is important for those studying affect and belonging as they relate to place because it centers a language of rights and power at the center of place-attachment. This same sense of ownership is at the heart of many other contested rights to place (from informal settlements, to squatters, to those experiencing property dispossession in various forms). Thorpe provides a useful theoretical framework for thinking through the affective underpinnings of ownership in other property struggles.
Affect is not only central to participants’ experience of Park(ing) Day but helps to explain the event’s sustained spread. Park(ing) Day participants flex their right to the city by taking over parking space for public use, but as Thorpe shows this experience is transformative and empowering beyond Park(ing) Day. It leads residents to reevaluate their longer-term capacity to enact change in their cities.
Yet another explanation for Park(ing) Day’s spread—one alluded to but less explored—is the incredible buy-in of urban policy-makers and professionals. From its very origins, Rebar’s installations gained immediate support from San Francisco City Hall, and Mayor Gavin Newsom offered his own parking space for use as a pop-up park. The lay participants Thorpe interviews are largely architects, landscape architects, and design professionals. Plus, Thorpe describes many city agencies and civic programs that lent support to the event over the years across all three sites. While Thorpe and participants describe the event as DIY or guerilla urbanism, this institutional support and highly professionalized engagement is likely key to the outcomes of Park(ing) Day.
This institutional support has important implications for Park(ing) Day and related citizen-led efforts to transform cities in the interest of residents. Thorpe highlights the fact that events like Park(ing) Day fit nicely into a neoliberal urban agenda where municipal services are outsourced to private actors. During Park(ing) Day, the creation of public space is outsourced to residents themselves. The emotional investment of Park(ing) Day enthusiasts may be directed toward exactly the kinds of creative placemaking that cities seek to enhance their marketability in the endless competition to attract the creative class.
These and a range of other critical debates circulate in the individual parking spaces turned pop-up parks in Thorpe’s study. Owning the Street should be essential reading for property scholars and for all those using property to understand issues related to citizenship, agency, power, and urban governance. I look forward to using the book to explore these issues in a graduate theory course, where we will be taking over a parking spot on Park(ing) Day this fall.