ABSTRACT
To territorialize property is to imagine it in particular ways. This chapter traces the ways in which dominant understandings of property – emergent in early rural enclosure, mobilized in early British Columbia, and now hegemonic - are sustained by particular conceptions of territory, as evidenced by the nostrum that ‘your home is a castle’. Such imaginaries of property rely on the installation and defence of hard boundaries around the propertied self from which others – the state, nonowners, other owners – are to be expelled. As the self is spatialized, so is property itself. Such Blackstonian conceptions serve to reimagine property itself. Rather than a bundle of relations, ‘property’ itself becomes territorialized, and thus imagined as the object of property itself. Such framings are of profound consequence, holding up unjust and extractive mindsets. The chapter demonstrates the invidious work of this territorial logic through an exploration of the violent and racist enforcement of the ‘castle doctrine’ in trespass cases, notably the widespread adoption of ‘stand-your-ground’ laws in the U.S. and the killing of Colten Boushie, an Indigenous man in Saskatchewan, by a white property owner. While territorial imaginaries over-protect fee-simple owners, those who do not occupy property’s ‘castle’ – notably houseless people - face particular vulnerabilities.
