2011 Urban Geography Plenary Lecture—Colored Rabbits, Dangerous Trees, and Public Sitting: Sidewalks, Police, and the City

Urban geographers would argue that cities are distinct spaces that need to be treated on their own terms. Yet I fear that we have not given the specificity of urban law its due. My aim is to give one crucial, yet easily overlooked urban legal practice, that of "police," more careful attention. By "police" I mean "the regulation of the internal life of a community to promote general welfare and the condition of good order" (Neocleous, 2000, p. 1). I focus on the sidewalk as a particular police space. I also wish to demonstrate the distinctiveness of police, particularly when compared with rights-based understandings of public space. Yet the two frequently collide, as we can see with reference to a constitutional challenge to a sit/lie ordinance in Seattle. Police won, as it usually does. But to accuse police of an assault upon rights is, in several senses, beside the point, for police operates in a different register. Police thus must be understood on its own terms and not reduced to other governmental logics.