The law journal Jotwell examined Law and Neighborhood Names, a paper written by Fordham Law Professor Nestor Davidson and University of Houston Law Center Professor David Fagundes. In it, they investigate how “law both enables and constrains the ability of city residents to claim, name, and often rename their neighborhoods,” and the greater implications this has on urban governance and community relations.
Law and Neighborhood Names provides a new perspective on this complex phenomenon. The authors also provide a pragmatically effective set of tools for addressing the injustices that so regularly flow from gentrification.
To be sure, gentrification is just one of the contemporary issues, though a key one, on which this article sheds new light. The authors also provide fresh insights on important debates about ownership, governance, identity, and space – informing conversations within the fields of property law, local government law, and toponomy (the sociology of place naming).
For example, they make a compelling and startlingly sensible case (effectively, a prima facie case) for a neighborhood to claim ownership of a neighborhood name as a form of cultural property. Although such claims are context-dependent, they argue that groups seeking to protect neighborhood names that have developed from the “bottom up” should be able to meet the three basic conditions of ownership of cultural property. These conditions are: [1] a coherent group of people that “can claim ownership;” [2] a “thing … that is the object of a property relation;” and [3] “a relationship whereby the thing is constitutive of the people’s identity.” (P. 801.)
