Abstract
Critical geographers have long been concerned with justice and the right to the city, but we have neglected powerful processes right underfoot. This is the premise of Nicholas Blomley’s important new book on the legal geographies of the sidewalk. The concluding chapter’s title ‘Hidden in plain view’ embodies the irony that critical geographers – ‘excited by other, sexier rationalities’ (p. 106) like neoliberalism or revanchism – have only recently taken seriously the legal and institutional geographies of mobility at work ‘organizing urban life to such remarkable effect’ (p. 107). Blomley’s careful exposition of the everyday legal and engineering logic of sidewalk circulation – what he calls ‘pedestrianism’ – contributes much to the recent mobilities turn in geography. But it raises even larger questions about one of the great social justice issues of the 21st century: the contested right to be mobile on the public street.
Geographers like Don Mitchell (2005) and others have asserted that presence on the street ‘is vital not just politically, but to the kind of social life we have come to signify by the shorthand term, “urban”’ (p. 566), and grounded deeply in the workings of law and regulation (Staeheli and Mitchell, 2008). But Blomley cautions against approaching the street through abstractions like rights or publicity. He instead directs attention to the materiality of sidewalk circulation as ‘produced by and made meaningful through prevailing forms of knowledge and practice’ (p. 10). Given their ‘pervasiveness and mundane materiality such spaces are easily overlooked, or treated as simply a backdrop for more exciting dynamics,’ he notes (p. 10). But such rationalities structure in powerful, yet taken-for-granted ways how we experience and indeed move through the public sphere.
The first chapter ‘Pedestrianism’ takes a recent Vancouver sidewalk protest as example of the limits to an entirely rights-based approach to the public sphere, and highlights how police power is used to regulate the sidewalk as a space not for expression but for pedestrian circulation. Chapter Two, ‘Civic humanism and the sidewalk’, reviews how different literatures frame publicity differently – in public space writings as political space, in urban design as civic space, and in mobilities as walking space – but share an assumption of the ‘civic ends’ of sidewalks (p. 28). He contrasts this with three areas of everyday legal practice: administration, judicial evaluation, and legislative debate. Chapter Three, ‘Thinking like an engineer’, uncovers the ‘particular, pervasive and entrenched view’ of city engineers (p. 30), which cares little for subjectivity and greatly for pedestrian circulation. Chapter Four, ‘Producing and policing the sidewalk’, examines the professional codification and analysis in engineering and the network of local laws that ‘regulates use, flow and blockage’ (p. 45). Chapter Five, ‘The history of pedestrianism’, traces how the police power evolved along with the sidewalk as space for travel. Chapter Six, ‘Judicial pedestrianism’, summarizes three centuries of case law in England and the USA focused ‘squarely upon pedestrian flow’ (p. 79). Chapter Seven, ‘Obstructions of justice’, uncovers the tensions between the logic of pedestrian flow and competing uses in case law, in which protesters or the homeless are constructed as ‘objects, devoid of humanist associations’ (p. 89). Chapter Eight, ‘Taking a constitutional’, shows how policies against aggressive panhandling frame rights primarily in terms of a ‘shield for the bounded self’ (p. 103) of the pedestrian.
Rights of Passage again proves mobility to be a very fruitful object of critical inquiry. The street is the most ubiquitous public space most of us encounter, primarily as a space of flows. Its taken-for-granted functionality belies power relations that can be starkly asymmetrical, starting with the very right to be on the street itself. Though this book addresses itself primarily to public space scholarship, it fits squarely in the refreshing ‘new’ mobilities literature that emphasizes movement ‘as a geographical fact that lies at the centre of constellations of power, the creation of identities and the micro-geographies of everyday life’ (Cresswell, 2010: 551). Blomley may discount mobilities research for its ostensible civic humanism, but this book contributes directly to such scholarship interested in ‘the unequal power relations that unevenly distribute motility, the potential for mobility’ (Hannam et al., 2006: 15).
If Blomley’s focus on sidewalk circulation is an important contribution, however, his critique at times seems misplaced. While argued in theoretical contraposition to the mobilities turn, this book is instead a natural engagement with it. And while he is correct to distinguish mobility from rights of public expression, mobility is certainly and explicitly a question of legal rights. The question ‘who has the right-of-way?’ is central to statutory and case law geographies of the street. In attacking police power regulation of pedestrian circulation (as public welfare good), he reproduces the very critical geographical bias towards the sidewalk as a space for dwelling and expression he contests in the first place.
Blomley’s political criticism of pedestrian circulation also seems quixotic in a wider context. In the USA in 2009 4,092 pedestrians – disproportionately urban dwellers – were killed in vehicular accidents, often where sidewalks do not exist (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2011). Yet Rights of Passage somehow, unfortunately, turns ‘pedestrianism’ into a pejorative. The book opens a powerful line of inquiry, but for sake of fullness and fairness it is one that ought to extend beyond the sidewalk to the entire public right-of-way, take the right to be mobile seriously, and acknowledge a still larger social justice question ‘hidden in plain view’: the cruel hegemony of the automobile. To readers who suspect a more walkable city is a more just city, and planning a potentially progressive force to achieve it, the book’s a priori critique of pedestrian circulation and regulation is distracting.
Rights of Passage is key part of human geography’s overdue mobilities turn, and advances our understanding of the street’s complex legal geographies. One only hopes that as critical geographers move in these exciting new directions we do so with a clear eye. For to step onto the sidewalk (and more frighteningly the street) is to confront not only traditional geographical assumptions about public space, but also a vast public sphere where the right to be mobile is paramount yet uneven, and often a matter of life and death. Walking, Blomley correctly notes, is more than getting from point a to point b. Indeed, it may be among the most radical things a city dweller, and critical geographer, can engage in.