Article The territory of property Nicholas Blomley Simon Fraser University, Canada Abstract The pervasive and important territorial dimensions of property are understudied, given the tendency to view territory through the lens of the state. Viewing both property and territory as relational and mutually recursive, I introduce the practical work of property’s territory, the historical moment in which it was produced, the powerful metaphors that work through it, and the habits and everyday practices it induces. The territory of property, I suggest, has a specificity, a presence, and a consequentiality, all of which demand our attention. Keywords property, territory, land, space, legal geography Territory must be approached politically in its his- torical, geographical and conceptual specificity. (Elden, 2010: 812) I Into the territory of property We live inside the territory of property, yet neglect the work that it does. In this paper, I make a foray into this space. Some preliminary clarifications: While both territory and property are capable of a number of meanings, for pres- ent purposes we can treat the former as a dis- crete, sharply bounded and spatially fixed area, premised on spatial exclusivity. I focus here on private property in land, as developed within the modern liberal system, including both its formal and technical dimensions, and its socio-political aspects. 1 While property is obvi- ously much more than territory, there is never- theless a strong association between the two. Although property lawyers would point out, rea- sonably, that property concerns a set of relations between people in regard to a parcel of land (Gray and Gray, 1998: 15), its strong spatial referent is such that we can understand why lay- persons would think of the territory as itself the property. Formal legal practices, such as the work of the court, frequently concern them- selves with property’s territorial manifestations. It would be a mistake to overlook property. Rather than merely the objects of ownership, property must be thought of as an organized set of relations between people in regards to a val- ued resource. As such, it provides a crucial grammar for many of the most consequential relations of social and political life, such as those between the individual and the collective (Nedelsky, 1990), human/non-human relations (Steinberg, 1995), and the ethics of sociality (Alexander, 2008). Property organizes the world for us, assigning resources to owners, apportioning rights and duties, constituting mar- kets, organizing concepts of citizenship and Corresponding author: Nicholas Blomley, Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada. Email: blomley@sfu.ca Progress in Human Geography 2016, Vol. 40(5) 593–609 ª The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0309132515596380 phg.sagepub.com