ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book considers the subject of parking spaces by rethinking the banal. In parking spaces, the continued production of legality is enlivened in such banal locations and with regard to ordinary aspects of daily life and routine. Parking is messy and rife with the inequalities that Dahl speaks of regarding political power. The book explores how parking spaces are interpreted and politically challenged according to cultural statements of local power, ownership, and identity in communities where the contest of authority reveals new ways to think about how law works in our everyday lives. It examines the semiotic and spatial markers of parking found in parable space, its construction, its enforcement, and its resistance. Socio-legal scholars Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey recognize the territorial aspects of rights discourse and legal consciousness on the socially semiotic and culturally geographic levels.
