Revealing Properties of Citizenship through Landscape: Enacting “Block 16” through Dispossession and Displacement

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between property and citizenship by engaging in a genealogy of one property in Portland, Oregon, “Block 16”, which details how this property was first enacted and then maintained into the 21st century. The paper foregrounds how normative definitions of liberal subjectivity were applied to Indigenous peoples originally living on this land, as well as valuations of citizenship for marginalised renters and the residents of a homeless encampment “illegally” occupying this property, to justify the dispossession and displacement of the groups using this same plot of land over time. I argue that the spatial enactment and maintenance of private property is contingent upon producing political subjects demarcated as “improper”, deviants from the normative or ideal liberal subject and citizen. To highlight how property shapes propriety, the paper engages in landscape analysis to reveal how the social relations producing land as property rely upon representations of impropriety and moral deficit to maintain the ownership model of private property against the historical use values of the land.