The Measure of Land

Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges

“…Pickering's (1995) comments on science seem appropriate: he refers to the 'representational idiom' in describing a form of science in which people and things tend to appear as 'shadows of themselves': 'Scientists figure as disembodied 4 Nicholas Blomley intellects making knowledge in a field of facts and observations [and] language' (6). Pottage (1994) notes than even when maps were drawn, 'they could not speak for themselves' (366) but needed to be interpreted according to local understandings and practices (cf. Property does not just rule through signs, but enrolls things, such as fences, contracts, and closed circuit television cameras.…”

Wiltshire Council v Cooper Estates Strategic Land Ltd: Development Plans and the Restriction of Town and Village Green Applications

“…However to my mind Alain Pottage is persuasive in his suggestion that registration reduces land 'to paper'. 58 If the register is entirely conclusive of legal right, owners can disregard management and use without consequence. 59 To that end, TVG law is an important means not only of protecting shared access rights, but also of ensuring that owners manage land effectively and responsively.…”

Territorializing Regulation: A Case Study of “Social Housing” in England

“…However, if the sector was to expand, the activities of its members would begin to cross these local boundaries, and local memory would be insufficient. And just as the land registration system came to rely on paper maps and “that peculiar quality of ‘certainty’ which is taken as the hallmark of the ‘accurate’ map” (Pottage 1994, 368), so the housing association sector had to be bureaucratically mapped by the Corporation: rules, monitoring, and supervision provided a form of certainty necessary to ensure the continuation of trust. Just as the “precision of trigonometry” (381) made land calculable, bureaucratic mechanisms removed understandings of trustworthiness from the vagueness of memory and the changeability of social connections.…”