What Public Presence? Access, Commons and Property Rights
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Author | Jonathan Mitchell |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663908093968 |
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
WHAT PUBLIC PRESENCE?
ACCESS, COMMONS AND
PROPERTY RIGHTS
JONATHAN MITCHELL
University College London, UK
ABSTRACT
The development of a rigorous basis for what it means to be public in rural space
depends in large part on the distinctive language and ideas of access and commons.
Understandings of rural space that inform policy-making are peculiarly dominated
by the rhetorical and political power of private property. It is access and commons
that give an opportunity to confront this. The article draws on an example of a chal-
lenge by a landowner to the heralded public access provisions of the Countryside and
Rights of Way Act 2000 to demonstrate the inadequate versions of access and the
public presence that the current deference to private property is producing. The
ensuing Public Inquiry was premised on an inadequate conception of public rights to
space and a concomitant privileging of private property. In several ways the Inquiry
set out deliberately to exclude the voices and claims of publics. The article identifies
four primary areas in which the possibilities for promoting a new public presence in
rural space via access and commons coincide.
KEY WORDS
Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000; Dartmoor; open access; private property
rights; public presence
INTRODUCTION
THE CONCEPTS of ‘commons’ and ‘access’ both provide vocabularies by
which to debate a new public presence in, or right to, rural space. They
can be used to present different ideological, political and practical chal-
lenges to oversimplified notions of private property, which continue to wield
far-reaching rhetorical and political power in advanced liberal democracies.
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 17(3), 351–367
DOI: 10.1177/0964663908093968
This article teases out the ways in which challenges to assumptions about
private property emanating from a reinvigorated focus on commons elide
with those presented by the possibilities of meaningful public access in rural
space. It is not a new idea, but no less salient for it, that a renewed public
presence in the countryside (for it is this to which the idea of commons in
this context arguably ultimately amounts) depends entirely on the ways in
which citizens are able to access it. This is not to repeat Hardin’s error of
conflating commons with ‘open access’ (Hardin, 1968) but to argue that the
complex and nuanced rights structures that overlie commons might give
space for a new public presence in the countryside.
In reviewing four of the ways in which an agenda of ‘publicness’ is present
in similar forms in the vocabularies of commons and access I want also to show
that they do not necessarily represent ‘sure fix’ solutions, for both can be
undermined to reinforce precisely those assumptions about private property
that they would seem to provide an opportunity to confront. This work
explores the ways in which contemporary public access to the countryside
in England is being subverted by vested interests and the ideological power
of private property. By drawing on the detailed analysis of a particular case
– the dispute over public access to Vixen Tor in the Dartmoor National Park
– I will reflect on how some of the lessons from this state of affairs might
relate to the re-emergence of commons as a tool for achieving things in space.
COMMONS AND PUBLICNESS
First, it is necessary to discuss what commons might amount to in the context
of land and property – as a concept and aspiration. Commons provide a liberal
access regime (although not necessarily for publics) and an opportunity to
consider others, to extend decision-making horizons beyond the self (as indi-
vidual, family or class) to embrace the needs of those who are marginalized
under contemporary property arrangements. Their needs become germane
precisely because they are given the opportunity to be included within the
commons landscape – a landscape that ceases to be about exclusion. Access
is about opportunities to be included within landscapes and, although being
able physically to access these spaces is crucial to this, it is artificial to separate
physical access from all the other forms of access to rural space that a healthy
public presence requires, namely political and ideological claims. By contrast,
as a relationship founded on the power to exclude, any public benefits that
arise from private property are only the by-product of private rights and even
these frequently arise only from the pressure placed upon private property
by the state.
The concept of ‘publicness’ is being deployed here as a foil against some
of the assumptions made about private property. Respecting the necessary
ethereality of the idea need not mitigate its usefulness to this task. Although
a full explanation and definition of ‘publicness’ might be possible in a lengthy
political treatise, it is necessary here only to situate the use of the term to
352 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 17(3)
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