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4. SURFACES VISIBILISE LAW, SPECIFICALLY PRIVATE PROPERTY AND PUBLIC ORDER

To understand the legal bindings of city surfaces, I turn to the discipline of legal geography, which explores connections between law, space and society, looking at how cities regulate space (see Blomley, 1994, 2004, 2011; Delaney, 2010; Blomley, Delaney and Ford, 2001; Layard, 2012; Layard and Bennett, 2015; Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, Keenan, 2015; Braverman, Blomley, Delaney and Kedar, 2014). Legal geography developed as part of a wider context of the ‘spatial turn’ in humanities and social sciences, as law’s response to the need for a fundamental engagement with space from within the legal discipline. This is based on a recognition that law operates through space rather than upon it, and is a considerable shift from “legal judgments, executive powers, legislation and legal commentaries [that] tend to treat space as something to be planned over, built on, cultivated, bought, sold and/or protected; a blank canvas or platform to be smoothly acted upon” (Keenan, 2015, p. 21).

Legal geographers have argued that law and space cannot exist outside each other, and have further emphasized the embeddedness of legal geographies into social and political systems. These readings can provide critical understandings of the governance and regulation of urban environments, of how law appears in cities and determines their daily operations. I want to propose an application of the methods and procedures of legal geographies to the study of surfaces, and I focus on legal scholar Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s conceptualisation of the lawscape (2015) as my main tool of investigation. Exposing the law and its emplaced workings, the lawscape describes the legal complexities of city surfaces, and their entanglements with sanctioned and unsanctioned inscriptions.

The surface lawscape is of the material world, but is conditioned by social manipulation and legal instrumentation: the law produces it, and it produces law. It is a material, cultural and political artefact, reinvented with each new development of surface coating technologies, reconfigured by each addition of an LED billboard display and strained with every conviction of criminal damage and vandalism. Non-definitive boundaries between public and private, surfaces are actualised anew with each occupation, in a recurring process of activation, materialisation and visibilisation, all of which tilt the law to different degrees. However, one thing they cannot do is escape the law, or function outside it, because law is everywhere. This understanding enables a heightened visual and material unfolding of the spaces of the city and the surface, just like adding a permanent base filter to one’s perception of the environment: no surface, no inscription, no sign can exist outside the law.

“While you are reading this, you are in the lawscape […] the law spreads on pavements, covers the walls of buildings, opens and closes windows” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, p. 38). “We-you, I-are never outside of the nomosphere, never free of its effects; never not pragmatically engaging nomospheric traces” (Delaney, 2010, p. 25). “Even when no coercive force is apparent, […] law quietly shapes the built space and the social interactions that take place in it. And as it does so, certain cultural values are literally built into the urban fabric” (Valverde, 2012, p. 21).

Urban surfaces are thoroughly legally bound and materially produced, beyond the obvious razor wires, keep out signs and anti-climb paints. Surfaces are relational spaces and legal products (Blomley, 2014), and they are uniquely relevant to understanding two fundamental postulates of the legal city: private property and public order. Property and order are inscribed in the way surfaces are equipped to deal with approved and unapproved signage, and can be inferred through an understanding of surface inscriptions and materialities. The surface lawscape becomes an engulfing, dominating force, whose influence is exerted past the obvious physical markers, and whose subversions are resilient objects of further legal contention. Space is law is surface.

The first claim at territories is always associated with ownership and is often exclusionary, as the rights to public visibility and display come second to the right to property and its integrity. When ownership takes precedence, there is no envisioning of property scenarios by non-owners, which is why graffiti is damaging and not welcome.

Offending against property is not just an offence against a thing, but also against the values that make it and the bodies who own it. Breaking, cutting, scratching, tearing and damaging are all done to the physical surface, but they acquire symbolic meaning as being done against the owned property, and against the right to private ownership itself. Scratching a surface is not just altering the surface matter, it is also violating the idea of property and its implicit entitlements and restrictions.

5. INSCRIPTIONS TURN PRIVATE PROPERTY INTO A PRECARIOUS COMMON (PRECARIOUSNESS IS ACCESSIBILITY)

Blomley argues that property is deeply social and political, structuring immediate relations between people as well as larger liberal architectures, such as the division between public and private spheres (Blomley, 2004, XVII). Property is material and tangible, but it is also social, ideological and political, and it shapes all these spheres. This is supported by David Delaney, who speaks of a continuous conditioning of our spatial performances and imaginaries by the spatialities and materialities of the public and the private (Delaney, 2010, p. 44). Our understanding of the public and the private determines our understanding of the world, what is allowed, what is proper and where it is proper:

we cannot conceive the ‘what’ without grasping the ‘where’: how we can be, where we can be, the traces we are allowed to leave there – are all closely bounded by property and ownership. Spaces can serve as means of enforcing laws of inclusion and exclusion (who can belong where), but they also constitute the identities of the subjects they include or exclude. (Keenan, 2015, p. 30)

When law protects ownership, it restricts access to property, establishing exclusionary citizenship as just and good, and enabling the identity formation of the property owner as entitled and privileged. This is the hegemonic ownership model for understanding property, sharply explained by Felix Cohen (Blomley, 2004, XIV):

“Property to which the following can be attached: To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold. Signed: Private citizen. Endorsed: The state.”

The solitary owner exercising exclusionary rights over a bounded space, in a politically authorised claim, forms the basis of what geographer Don Mitchell described as the intentionally exclusive public sphere, a legal construct where the “legitimate public only includes those who have a place governed by private property rules to call their own”. (Mitchell, 2001, p. 16)

They also get to regulate the aspect and purity of space and what is proper, and all non-property-owning publics can do is to either comply or defy: “The rights of the private owner are seen as legitimately trumping those of the collective, and are deemed both anterior and superior.” (Blomley, 2004, p. 4)

Blomley speaks of the politics of urban property in Unsettling the City (2004), arguing that property in all its manifestations has a relation to the state, and that enjoyment of property frequently depends on the disposition of others. However, the political regulations behind the property-owning system are easily obscured, because we perceive them as given and we rarely question their legitimacy: it’s not yours so you can’t touch, you don’t make the rules, because you are not the owner. Is it possible then to define a legal space outside private property, or alongside, besides, in-between, additional to private property? Is there a way for surface-occupying inscriptions to specify a legal space of their own, through occupation? If, legally, “there is no category of public space in England and Wales” (Layard, 2012, p. 262), then where would we start to define such a space? A space determined by co-creation, inclusion, subversive opportunity and plural access, where graffiti acquires a legal status not just as criminal damage, but also as public culture, it’s yours so you can touch, overwrite, challenge or ignore it, you (too) make the rules, although you are not the owner. Contributor without documents, non-property-bound decision- maker, owning it without being the legal owner.

Cities produce this every day through their surface claims and occupations, so perhaps this layer of common property is already being sufficiently activated, it’s not yours but you can touch, you (too) can make some rules, although you are not the owner. Surfaces sit in a space between the public and the private, and they are of an ambiguous communal type which has been referred to as an alternative to private (but not public) (Hardt and Negri, 2009), the grey area between private and public (Visconti et al, 2010) and a type of property which subverts “hegemonic power relations” and “[is] experienced as something in-between public and private by those who engage with [it]” (Keenan, 2015, p. 92). Not public, nor private, but communally used; unwittingly exposed to inclusion and resilient in its support for dissent: such is the nature of the surfacescape.

Surfaces are territories of friction between owned and claimed, and between private and public. Envisioned as part of a commons, surfaces become a political imaginary as well as a material aspiration and an organising tool (Chatterton, 2010), not just the public-facing boundary of exclusionary property. Chatterton argues for the commons as a key tactical repertoire in the struggle against spatial enclosure and privatisation, and surface inscriptions demonstrate a scenario of social production and collective authorship for such a project. Surfaces unlock the power regimes inscribed in private property, while simultaneously triggering property’s social function through their reluctant or willing acceptance of signs and inscriptions. Graffiti exposes the conventions of private property again, and again, and again, until it turns property into a precarious commons, a permanently temporary communal space, more visible than any certificate which designates the property’s exclusive privacy (Dickinson, 2008). In the words of Alison Young,

The persistent acts of mark-making that constitute situational art enact a legality in which citizens are authorised by adaptation and by proximity rather than by use or ownership. In each act of installing a situational artwork, then, the artist demonstrates a way of thinking not only about the image of the city, but also the city as image, and an image crucial to the foundation of a public city. (2014, pp. 56-57)

Surfaces are therefore the bearers of damage to private property, but they are also the enablers of a public formation, a volatile space of public usage which functions despite, or regardless, the legal severity of ownership. Surfaces are privately owned, but publicly used, in public sight, like an open-source book of urban production and participation. Layard describes a similar situation in the legal allowance of communities and locals to envision their public spaces through the Localism Act 2011, which enables residents to shape neighbourhoods in their own image (Layard, 2012, p. 262). Urban surfaces are also shaped in the image of city inhabitants, some by legal provision and others from personal impetus.

The cultural force of the property ownership model is its clarity, certainty and order: “the visible geographies of property (the maps, fences, signs and so on) give a reassuring legibility of property” (Blomley, 2004, p. 14). What happens on surfaces, however, is a complexification of this certainty, whereby property and its marks become ambiguous, uncertain and challengeable. In fact, this lack of stability is the clearest strength that surfaces possess, as they can and will keep transforming. This makes them more resilient and ultimately impossible to control by any single discourse, be that of private property or urban order. This understanding of surfaces resonates with Keenan’s characterisation of space as movement and becoming, as never finished and constantly performed, as full of internal conflicts and not possessing any single identity (Keenan, 2015, p. 42). Surfaces enable a heterogeneous experience of property, which becomes malleable, subversive and politically productive in its support of alternatives (Keenan, 2015).

6. SURFACE CONFLICT IS SPATIAL JUSTICE

The struggle between bodies to occupy a specific place, at a specific time, is defined by Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos as spatial justice, a form of spatial tension that keeps bodies moving and generates territories. Other scholars have written about spatial justice as a form of critical spatial thinking, among which most notably geographer Edward Soja and the Los Angeles School of Urbanism (Soja, 2010).

Closely related to Lefebvre’s radical ideas about the right to the city, Soja theorised spatial justice as a tool to spatialise political debate and social struggle, and to advocate for equitable distribution of resources and services. Space is socially produced and can therefore be socially changed, a process which is apparent at surface level through struggles over surface occupation. Inscriptions as bodies, coatings as bodies, the buff as a body, advertising and dominant neoliberal architectures as bodies, abstract and coloured bodies, all fight over surface occupation in the same place, at the same time. The thing about surfaces is that multiple bodies can occupy the same space at the same time, and can co-exist in parasitic, belligerent or agreeable terms. Surfaces allow for multiple occupation because of their specific type of spatial depth, which concentrates materials and expressions within broad two-dimensional spaces. The fight for visibility and territory could then be read as a form of surface justice, with inscriptions as bodies performing a complex, fluctuating occupation:

Bodies carry law and space, indeed generate law and space, through their moving on the lawscape. Just as any surface, the lawscape is tilted [and, just as any lawscape, the surface is tilted]. Bodies fall more readily onto other bodies, and the sliding is more easily allowed by the terrain. Some bodies weigh more than others, and are more powerful than other bodies and force the latter out. The conflict of bodies carries on, mostly on unequal footing. (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, p. 192)

Inscriptions generate territories, they repeat and invent norms and they set up habits — all of which become legal modulations. Surface territories are not only material and cultural artifacts, but they are also political achievements, as they communicate and convey meaning about a variety of different claims (more on the functions of territory in Delaney (2005). Each new addition to the lawscape mutates, even if barely noticeably, the web of spatial desire around it. Surfaces appear magnetic and matter becomes attractive, they oppress and they enable, as spatial justice unveils at surface level. The right to occupy the same space at the same time must be fought for, so there will be surface treatments and cross-overs, discrete subversions and dominant pictures, in an ongoing fertile battle. While there is conflict, justice is encouraged, because conflict is movement, change and inclusion, and conflict is just. Conflict can be interpreted as the spatial justice of the surfacescape. Solve the conflict through apparent consensus, and the lawscape becomes a dictatorship, by excluding, censoring and silencing attacks against its precarious order. Embrace the surface conflict, and you are looking at the continuous making of surface spatial justice, in its thickly layered, political displays of entitlement and exclusion.

When alternative claims to property overlap, surfaces emerge as sites for productive conflict. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos speaks about the violence of space and argues that all space is violent, because only one body (or assemblage) can occupy “a specific place at a specific time” (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2015, p. 198; Blomley, 2003). I suggested that surfaces are nevertheless able to tolerate multiple occupation, as they keep on public display their archives of challenges and impositions. Surface bodies can outwrite, obscure or sanction each other, and the process can be violent, but this continuous tension and lack of resolve is the very bloodline of surface production and participation. What would the city look like if these multiple and overlapping property claims were formally acknowledged? (Blomley, 2004, p. 155). Acknowledged by whom, one must ask: by councils and governments, by courts and legislators, or by individual property owners?

Acknowledgment enables power over the acknowledged, it implies entitlement and allows one to define and control its object of recognition. It happened when graffiti was acknowledged as an art form, setting the stage for the development of overbearing sanctioned paintings, and it happens every time an independent, outsider, or underground culture becomes legitimised and included in the mainstream discourse of, for example, the creative city. If all existing inscriptions and their spatial claims were legally sanctioned, there would appear a new visual language staking claims illicitly, and keeping the politics of the urban edge alive and kicking.

The surface lawscape is legally suspended between the protection of within and the regulation of without. The law compresses surfaces until a point of complete reduction, where they ideally become no more than planar borders, frictionless transition points between two regimes of control that were instituted and are managed by a single system of governance. The thinner the surface, the less problems it poses, as its materiality disintegrates, its visuality is restricted and its embodied presence is obliterated by urban territory regimes. The border as concept, as legal threshold between two qualitatively different spaces of here and there, of public and private. The paper sheet that exists only conceptually, to demarcate its public and private sides, and to reject any subversion or contestation.

However, just like sheets of paper are material objects and not just bearers of inscription, borders are never pristine lines of demarcation and exclusion: they are loci of contestation and tangible physical conflict, sites of materiality which become activated through social production. With each meddle, surfaces swell, they become larger and meatier, and they cumulate and stack every addition and reclamation.

“Surfaces become complicated for the law because they form interstitial repositories of potential, of the neither public, nor private, of the legal and spatial ambiguity of threshold spaces, neither within, nor without” (Brighenti, 2010). The thicker the surface, the harder for the law to issue comprehensive mechanisms to control it, and so surfaces become a third type of space, in-between the public and the private.

Open to access and vulnerable to conflict, surfaces as commons are sites of tactical engagement and spatial co-production, where censorship and exclusion are co- designed out of the picture. Every protective coating gets nailed by a tag, and each tag is overwritten by another, which then gets cleaned by the buff, which is covered by a billboard, which is replaced by a mural, which in turn gets tagged and restored and tagged again. Exclusion prevention through multiple co-design; plural inscriptions designing out the single authority; spatial justice through ongoing conflict. Temporary concessions, with no resolution in sight.