6 - A Future Dystopia

Summary

Our book dwells on a fault line between two tectonic forces: on the one hand, the seemingly inexorable ‘progress’ of enclosure, and on the other, the resistance to its ‘rational’ linear logic and its (seemingly) unstoppable trajectory. Through stories of rupture, of times when these tectonic forces collided in plainer view, The Lawful Forest's critical history of the last millennia reveals continuities, ongoing, recurring moments of societal inflection. This is the common thread that joins our critical history of property, protest and (claims to) spatial justice.

These inflection points are profound because they bring into sharper focus the nature of our relations with land; as both a physical space, and the abstract spatial orderings that property and its laws enliven. Such relations have played out against one unbending truth, that of land's finitude. In writing of the homeless in American cities in the 1990s, Jeremy Waldron spells out what land's finitude means for ‘those without property and those without community’, and the stark implications this has for spatial justice. It is a simple truth worth repeating: ‘everything that is done has to be done somewhere. No one is free to perform an action unless there is somewhere he (sic) is free to perform it.’ Another quote underscores this same pressing issue of land's scarcity, but it also reveals an alternate counter-truth. This is the spatial implication of what Chapter 3 first describes as the commonweal, where ‘the expansion of public wealth in land creates more space for everyone, while the expansion of private wealth in land reduces the space available for others’.

These inflection points likewise reveal the spatial choices made over time; where the commonweal confronts private wealth, and the linear path of enclosure is briefly disrupted before the status quo resumes. Critically, they provide the briefest of glimpses into other paths not taken, those against-the-grain spatial alternatives that would appear as random aberrations but for a longer-term, critical view of land and its history. In the twenty-first century, land's finitude now means that our available options are increasingly fewer and more limited. We are simply running out of space – and time.

We are at another inflection point now, perhaps the gravest ever. We approach the edge of the precipice, the cusp of William Gibson's ‘Jackpot’, the literary device employed at the very beginning of this book.