Owning the Street

"This wonderful book makes the law of property as engaging as a novel, and shows that ordinary people can be more creative in city-building than city planners ever imagine."

Mariana Valverde, Professor, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto

"Through a remarkably vivid and detailed account, Amelia Thorpe explores how PARK(ing) Day unravels contemporary assumptions of legality, ownership, and property rights in the city and unleashes its latent possibilities."

Jeffrey Hou, Professor and Director of Urban Commons Lab, University of Washington, Seattle

"Owning the Street is lively, smart, and original. Amelia Thorpe uses DIY urbanism to explore the lived and everyday enactments of property and ownership, in original and creative ways, revealing their significance and ambiguities."

Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University

"Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property is invaluable for everyone interested in the future of cities and especially for those in search of novel ways to radically accomplish incremental change through continued civic creativity, committed talent, and dedication."

Carlos J. L. Balsas

Landscape Journal

"Interrelationships between sociology, law and planning are not much explored in scholarly and professional fields of planning, to put it mildly. Amelia Thorpe's publication, Owning the Street, gives a wonderful demonstration of the significance of adopting just such an interdisciplinary perspective. [... ] This inspiring book must be used and discussed in bachelor or master classes of planning schools."

Willem Salet

Planning Theory

"Amelia Thorpe's Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property is a thought-provoking scholarship on the role of user-generated urbanism in shaping the contemporary metropolis. [... ] Thorpe weaves magic through her captivating story-telling style backed by state-of-the-art research to elucidate the role of PARK(ing) Day as a compelling idea which disrupts the status quo to be a zeitgeist, which could revolutionise the contemporary socio-political discourse and inspire the readers to work for a sustainable future."

Emotion, Space and Society

"Owning the Street is an engaging, charmingly authentic work that highlights how property is too frequently overlooked as local, small-scale, and vernacular. [... ] [It] is an important addition to the burgeoning scholarship of critical property theory and its intersections with the city. Thorpe takes a quirky, playful, and above all transitory intervention into public space, and yields a work that is rich, creative, and enduring in its significance to law, property, and social politics."

John Page

Legalities

"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."

Esther Sullivan

Contemporary Sociology

"Thorough, thoughtful, and nuanced."

Natalie Osborne

Journal of Sociology

“Owning the Street: The Everyday Life of Property is both a meaningful contribution to property law and sociolegal scholarship, and an important advancement of pop-up and DIY urbanism.”

Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence

“Owning the Street, however, is not about parking spaces as much as about how temporary, bounded moments can reveal longstanding efforts to reimagine a social order.”

Law & Social Inquiry

“PARK(ing) Day is a powerful example of small-scale activities by which residents can claim their right 'to make the city their own work of art' (Roulier, 2022, 597), and Amelia Thorpe's insightful book does a wonderful job of exploring it.”

Tanu Sankalia, University of San Francisco

“Owning the Street is then an exemplary socio-legal analysis of urban democracy in action, and one that deserves to be read by all with more than a passing interest in the politics of public space.”

City & Community