Ownership and belonging in urban green space

This chapter examines urban green spaces which are accessible to the public, from both anthropological and socio-legal perspectives. It explores the legal and conceptual space for communal property, between notions of private and public property, drawing on a range of sources. Using a case study of Heeley People’s Park and two other urban parks in Sheffield, UK, the chapter considers different ownership structures and governance frameworks in relation to communal property in urban green space. It concludes that there is a mismatch between legal arrangements for the ownership, management and access to parks, and the practices of belonging and ownership (in a non-legal sense) which have changed the land over time. The consequences for park maintenance at a time when funding is diminishing from local government and other sources, are serious. The difficulties of articulating the discourse of communal property undermines efforts to secure the funding needed to protect and maintain these important community resources.

In the three Sheffield parks discussed in this chapter, tensions between the social, or perhaps moral, understandings of ownership and belonging, and the legal definition of property (public, private and communal), are highlighted through a bundle of rights analysis. We suggest that a similar contextual and temporal analysis, paying attention to both the law and to community practices, will reveal similar complexities and tensions in any particular urban green space.