WHEN ORDINARY CITIZENS HAD SOME EMINENT DOMAIN

JONATHAN ROWE, ON THE COMMONS - There was a time when commoners had
legal rights, and could take matters into their own hands when it came
to dealing with trespassers. Centuries ago in England, people with
common rights to land would "perambulate" it - what a wonderful word -
to make sure no bossy lords had installed fences or gates. Laborers
might carry "an axe, a mattock, and an iron crow. . . for the purpose of
demolishing any building or fence which had been raised without
permission," says E.P. Thompson, the British scholar, in his book
Customs In Common, quoting a contemporary source.


These evictions had an established legal basis. Coke's Institutes noted
that "If the Lord doth enclose any part, and leave not sufficient
common. . . commoners may break down the whole inclosure." Today we can
only wish. But while we don't have many legal rights to stand up to the
enclosers, there still are ways to challenge the psychology of defeat,
and help people remember what they have lost.

One example is an organization in Portland Oregon called City Repair,
which reclaims neighborhood intersections for common use. Local artists,
with the permission of the city, paint brilliant murals on the
intersections. People build cob structures, such as bulletin board
kiosks and tea houses. Residents start to see the streets and in fact
the whole city differently – as something that is theirs, rather than as
a grid of obstacles and boundaries. In at least one neighborhood that
was repaired in this manner, crime has dropped measurably.

Another example is a group in San Francisco called Rebar, which has
turned commons reclamation into performance art. Last week, the group
occupied metered parking spaces in downtown San Francisco and turned
them into mini-parks. . .

There is an infectious quality to efforts like this – a realization of
how hemmed in we are, a whiff of real freedom. When bike riders reclaim
the streets on their monthly Critical Mass rides, a similar feeling is
in the air (for riders and observers at least.) Private property once
was a banner of freedom; automobiles once provided a mobile version of
it But the wheel turns. Too much of a thing can turn it into its
opposite.

"We want to get the public to rethink the way streets are used," one
Rebar member told the Chronicle reporter, John King. "Why not interpret
a parking space as something that can be leased short term and used as a
legitimate extension of open space?" Start by leasing it, and pretty
soon people are asking who really owns that space to begin with.

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