The Mysterious Case of the Attacks Against the Halifax Public Gardens: The Enclosure of "Common" Property, Public Access to Nature, and Sustainability in the City

This Article will first describe the “thick” textured approach and methodological tools of urban legal anthropology applicable to researching and analyzing urban contact zones, which is then applied as the Article proceeds with the case study of the Halifax Public Gardens and the tree girdling and arson incidents that took place in 2022 to 2023. To situate the category of property within Halifax and within which the Halifax Public Gardens are found in order to move further into a discussion of property access and enclosure in the city, the Article then provides a description of the categories of urban property involved in and surrounding the case study of the Gardens as well as Halifax more broadly. Through the use of this case study, the Article then explores a number of questions surrounding what the development, enclosure, and application of stringent local bylaws to a slice of urban nature such as the Public Gardens can mean within the interactions and reactions of a city’s urban denizens within such a space. Next, there is an analysis of various considerations, justifications, and problems engaged when determining governance frameworks, structures, and degrees of urban common and public property access and use restrictions. Here, the Article draws on the right to the city and the notion of the urban commons alongside a discussion of urban “contact zones;” spatiotemporal (in)equality and the “time zoning” of use and access to urban common and public space; property and “belonging;” and processes of “disembedding” that can be implicated by degrees of horizontal versus vertical urban governance frameworks. Finally, the Article moves from the Halifax Public Gardens case study to briefly offer the broader context of other concurrent local conflicts and interventions with regard to parks, people, and access in Halifax in terms of the proliferation of encampments in parks fueled by the housing crises taking place in Halifax as well as other cities across Canada and North America. While property in Halifax remains situated within a dominant structuring logic and colonial infrastructure of property, property relations, access to property, property enclosure, and forms of property, this Article will specifically narrow in on questions surrounding the structure and legitimacy of these existing dominant forms of urban public and common property.