Book review: NICHOLAS BLOMLEY, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow. New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 129, ISBN 9780415575614
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663911411763 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| Author | Douglas Harris |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book reviews
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public Flow.
New York: Routledge, 2011, pp. 129, ISBN 9780415575614.
Michel Foucault begins The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences with a
list from the Argentinian essayist, Jorge Borges, that purports to divide the animal kingdom
into various categories. The list begins ‘(a) belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame’,
proceeds through ‘(i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush’,
and concludes ‘(n) that from a long way off look like flies’ (Foucault, 1970: xv).
Foucault uses this fanciful typology, attributed to an imaginary Chinese encyclopae-
dia, to suggest the power of categorization in the construction of knowledge. The simple
placement of categories in a list, and the use of an alphabeticalseries that links the various
categories to each other, lend authorityto the roll and structures how it is that we come to
know animals. Moreover, the list’s absurdity reveals, for Foucault, the limitations of any
ordering of the world, including our own: this entirely other ordering, incongruous and
irreconcilable with how we know animals, exposed, he suggested, the boundedness of
knowledge.
In his most recent book, Rights of Passage: Sidewalks and the Regulation of Public
Flow, geographer Nick Blomley includes a list, compiled by a civil engineer for the
City of Vancouver, that the city used in response to a court challenge to the validity of
its by-law prohibiting panhandling in portions of the downtown core. The engineer’s list
begins ‘(a) pedestrians goingfrom point A to point B, including pedestrians with visual or
ambulatory disabilities, (b) panhandlers, (c) street vendors’, continues through ‘(h) side-
walk cafes, (i) newspaper boxes, and (j) bus stops and shelters’, and concludes ‘(s) phone
booths, etc.’ (p. 31).
The city used this list of objects thatoccupy the sidewalk to support its proposition that
the challenged by-law did not aim at constitutional rights of free-expression or of security
of the person. Instead, the panhandling by-law was simply about securing unobstructed
pedestrian traffic flow, about peoplemoving on foot from one point to another, and about
managing competing uses of the sidewalk. A mix of animate and inanimate, Blomley
argues that the list reveals the way that municipal engineers, and by extension the cities
they work for, come to know the sidewalk. ‘Pedestrianism’, writes Blomley (his word),
‘understands the sidewalkas a finite public resource that is always threatenedby multiple,
competing interests and uses. The role of authorities, using law as needed, is to arrange
these bodies and objects to ensure that the primary function of the sidewalk is sustained:
that being the orderly movement of pedestrians from point a to point b’ (p. 3).
Social & Legal Studies
20(3) 401–417
ªThe Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663911411763
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