ABSTRACT
People feel possessive about spaces but with varying degrees of intensity. Feelings of belonging and ownership attach to national territory, for example, and this plays an important part in geopolitics, but an exclusive nationalism, one which denies the sharing of national space by diverse cultures, is far from universal. At the local level, an exclusive right to domestic space is a fairly common claim, one that may be recognized in law. The home is personal space or family space, one which others enter only by invitation. Individuals and groups also feel territorial about neighbourhoods, but whether they do or do not depends on the location and the social composition of the area. Difference, as I suggested in Chapter 5, is less likely to to be noticed, less likely to be a source of threat, in a weakly classified environment like Jane Jacobs’s Manhattan than it is in a strongly classified, purified space. However, the home, the neighbourhood and the nation are all potential spaces of exclusion.
