No Lawless Place: Foregrounding Property in Sociology

Abstract

Sociologists examine space and place as constitutive of social life but rarely attend to the fact that places are also real property. The authors use a law and society lens to investigate how property regulations (property rights, codes, zoning, and licensure) shape place characteristics for two very different cases: a neighborhood and a bathhouse. These regulations influence the characteristics that sociologists argue constitute places: location, materiality, meaning, and use. Both cases demonstrate how attending to the “legal life of place” reveals hidden mechanisms, challenges old assumptions, and opens new lines of inquiry. The authors conclude by discussing how property is hiding all over existing urban ethnographies and is central to the most pressing social issue of our time: the pandemic. The authors argue that no place is lawless and, therefore, that sociologists ought to foreground property in place research in order to highlight core sociological concerns such as power, the state, and inequality.