Territorial residents of public settings assert property rights over unclaimed items

Evidence

A somewhat stronger proprietary attitude has to do with the resident’s treatment of property items found in the setting. Pensioners, for example, claim any newspaper not in the hands of another as their own and, having read it, take the owner’s prerogative of passing it on to someone else. In fact, if conditions allow, the resident may even take on the owner’s prerogative of selling the item to someone else. Thus, for example, in one American city, early in 1970, a number of males took over a public dump for fun and profit. The municipal practice was to charge an admission fee to citizens wishing either to dispose of their excess possessions or to acquire more by choosing from what others had left. Unbeknownst to the authorities, however, a group of men went into business for themselves, picking over the piles of salvageable items and then setting up little second-hand stores around thei:..· trucks. Visitors to the dump were told that it was “too dangerous” to climb on the piles, and were “encouraged” to purchase any items they might want from the already established “stores.” It might be noted too, that the oft-reported tendency of employees to steal from their work places may have less to do with “bureaucratic distance” than with a strong sense of proprietary rights. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 760

Categorization

• SEED: The dump “second-hand store” racket is a vivid micro-case of informal economic territorialization that could anchor an article on how improvised order emerges in unmanaged public spaces.
• XREF: The proprietary-rights explanation of employee theft reframes what the reader may know about workplace deviance and connects to Lofland’s general thesis of resident-type authority over public space. — connects to: Common goods must be appropriated before they can serve anyone — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 35