Space, place and law

Presenting author: Robyn Bartel (University of New England)

Other author: Professor Jennifer Carter (University of the Sunshine Coast)

Our launch of the new Handbook "Space, Place and Law" will showcase the collection's expansive interrogation of the spaces and places of law, and the numerous intersections of space, place and law in all of our lives. A number of cross-cutting multidisciplinary themes will be explored, including environmental justice and sustainability, drawing on a diversity of sites - urban and rural, terrestrial and marine areas, agential and storied spaces, and fictional as well as 'real' places. On the latter distinction, contributing author Bennett argues that 'places are products of storying'. In their opening chapter Bartel and Carter contend that we are equally products of place, and hence our stories and our laws also. In their closing chapter, the editors extend this observation to a critique of the ethics of dominant approaches and their 'fitness for purpose' in the Anthropocene. There is great potential for a reimagined 'geoethical' legal geography to recognise, quoting from the conference theme, our "influences on human and more-than-human worlds, and the contribution the discipline can make to more just and sustainable futures".

Presenting author: Chen Li (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Other authors: Min Jiang (City of Whittlesea, Victoria), Mark Wang (University of Melbourne)

Preservation of historical and cultural heritage is emerging as an important 'public interest' in urban China. It is challenging the prevailing 'public interest' of property and land development. Based on the Dongguan street redevelopment project in Dalian, this chapter explores the competition and collision between these two 'public interests' and associated impacts on individual households' rights and interests. Seeking to preserve local heritage, an NGO, the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, successfully intervened to stop a local government-initiated housing demolition. In so doing, however, local households' rights and interests were also impacted.

The findings are used to tease out the representativeness of these two 'public interests', and to contribute to greater understanding of the increasing participation of NGOs in urban governance, as well as the role of local government-private developer coalitions, and how individual households' rights and interests may be better served.

Presenting author: Joel Correia (University of Florida)

This paper evaluates the limits of justice in settler colonial contexts across the Americas. I begin by reviewing legal geography scholarship, arguing for a closer engagement with critical environmental justice studies and attention to settler colonialism. What follows is a countertopographic legal geography analysis, that shows how extractive imperatives and settler legal frameworks in the U.S. and Paraguay shape Indigenous struggles for land restitution, running up against the aporia the law/justice dialectic. If all the land was stolen, how is justice possible in the settler colonial present?

I argue that though the very structure of Indigenous land rights (re)produce legal geographies that limit what justice is and can be, Indigenous peoples and their allies in Paraguay and the U.S. refuse to abide by the law's limits, instead working to counter processes that perpetuate erasure. I conclude by considering the role of engaged, critical scholarship vis-à-vis struggles for Indigenous environmental justice. 

Presenting author: Nicole Graham (University of Sydney)

Not knowing or caring that life depends entirely on the material conditions and limits of a given landscape is the sign of an already dematerialised culture (Plumwood 2008, p. 141; McManus and Haughton 2006, p. 118). The dominant legal model of dephysicalised property encourages dematerialisation. Dephysicalised property has been instrumental to the dispossession of human and non-human communities from their lands and the disentanglement of integrated ecologies into separable natural resources and eco-services. The simplicity of the dephysicalised model of modern property relations masks the complex, dynamic and networked nature of peopled landscapes, allowing landholders to disown the adverse consequences of their proprietorship. This chapter critically reviews the concept of dephysicalised property, its geographical manifestations, and its corollary: the disownership and externalisation of its material conditions and products. Dephysicalised property facilitates a powerful cultural fantasy that whatever externalities there may be, their cost will be borne by anonymous and future others, in the 'distant elsewhere' (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) of 'shadow' lands (Plumwood 2008, p. 139). 

Presenting author: Amanda Kennedy (Queensland University of Technology)

Other author: Cameron Holley (UNSW)

Many jurisdictions are grappling with the governance of fossil fuel developments, as well as emerging energy technologies (including unconventional gas and renewables), and their environmental, economic and social impacts. A range of public and private governance arrangements have been implemented to tackle this challenging policy context, yet their capacity to transcend sectoral boundaries and engage with the complex dynamics at stake has been limited. While corresponding debates have focused on the appropriate scale for governing the energy-environment nexus - in particular, local versus state / federal government control of natural resources - what has been missing from the broader discussion is the potential for governance approaches to be more 'place aware'.

Through an analysis of the processes for energy development approval in New South Wales, Australia, this presentation explores the ways in which governance of the energy-environment nexus has thus far engaged with matters of place. It then contemplates an alternative governance option that could strengthen engagement with place in energy development decision-making. 

Presenting author: Daniel Robinson (UNSW)

Other authors: Associate Professor Danielle Drozdzewski (Stockholm Huniversity), Jaruwan Kaewmahanin (Mangrove Action Project Thailand)

The 2004 Asian tsunami saw many people lose their land title certificates and identification documents, formal materialities that perished as well as the numerous families and communities. As rebuilding ensued, land without documentation became vulnerable to processes of land grabs with heightened consequences for the Moken, Moklen and Urak Lawoi communities in Phang Nga and Phuket in Thailand. Here we explore the traditions, ceremonies, informal laws, and Royal edicts that have allowed the communities to stay there, and the subsequent land insecurity. The existence of burial grounds and important ceremony sites on land under contestation raises significant questions about infringement on the practice of Moken and Urak Lawoi traditions, customs and 'place-laws'. For the Moken, Moklen and Urak Lawoi, their assertion of customary claims and 'place-laws' using evidence such as photos, stories, ceremonies and even human bones demonstrates a necessarily highly material approach to land law. 

Presenting author: Lee Godden (University of Melbourne)

Other author: Robyn Bartel (University of New England), Jennifer Carter (University of the Sunshine Coast)

This presentation forms part of the themed session of 'Space, Place and Law'. The year 2018 marked the 100-year anniversary of battles in the Somme Valley in France in the 'Great War'. Ten percent of Australia's population volunteered in the First World War, with many dying in these battles. Most were buried in the distinctive wartime cemeteries that registered the deaths of soldiers of the Great War. As a consequence of agreements at international law, the spaces of the French countryside remain punctuated by Commonwealth cemeteries where the land has been leased by the French government to nations which were allies in the First World War.

The 'gifted' land, acquired by the acknowledgement of that sacrifice, creates an 'Australian extra-territorial nation space', excised from the neighbouring private property that remains decidedly French. Places where Australians are buried are surrounded by extra territorial place markers of the Australian nation, such as Rue de Melbourne; that ironically have been perpetuated in ceremonies and commemorative signifiers by French villagers.

This presentation references Lefebvre's views on the production of space to explore the interplay between sacrifice, law, and place in constituting sacred property, as part of a wider examination of the construction of place and the memorialisation of an extra-territorial nation space.  

Presenting author: Benno Fladvad (University of Hamburg)

Other authors: Silja Klepp (University of Kiel), Florian Dünckmann (University of Kiel)

In the face of climate change and the ongoing industrialization of agriculture, various groups worldwide, such as small-scale farmers and the inhabitants of vulnerable island states, face the reality of land loss and draw on the powerful language of rights, in order to regain cultural, economic, and political autonomy. In this contribution we discuss this 'geography of emerging rights' and seek to understand how these groups reclaim land and how they establish new relationships amongst space, nature, politics, and law, in other words, how they aim to reclaim the 'nomos'.

Conceptually, we draw on agonistic political theory that allows us to grasp the inherent contradictions in the existing 'topology' of rights and to empirically look at the political energies that they might reveal in different contexts of the global south. We conclude by discussing the relations between loss of land and sovereignty, environmental (in-)justice and the emergence of new rights.

Presenting author: Meg Sherval (University of Newcastle)

The global energy landscape is transforming. Debates about energy security and energy scarcity have become increasingly important as nations seek to ensure continuity. Accompanying this, however, has also been the increase in community opposition most notably in Australia, Britain and the U.S.

Within activist communities, a gendered response may be seen to be occurring where women are primarily becoming the face of local resistance. Drawing on in-depth interviews with activists in Britain, this paper considers where and how place and law become intertwined and how communities and governments are responding in this space.