Abstract

The primacy of private property, and its incumbent rights, structures who has access to space in the city and who can be displaced. This regime of property includes not only theoretical and legal underpinnings of property and space in the city, but also the narratives and normative understandings necessary to support this institution. This thesis looks towards denaturalizing private property as the only conceivable way of organizing space (Macpherson, 1978). The act of gardening has long been linked to claiming property, while domestic gardens have been characterized as both paradoxical spaces (Longhurst, 2013) and liminal zones (Blomley, 2004c). I look at the ways that supposedly rigid boundaries of property are entangled, transgressed, and blurred through everyday interactions between people and plants in the gardens and alleys of the Parc Extension neighbourhood in Montréal.

This study is a personal reflection on gardening practice along the boundaries of public and private. I draw from my own gardening experience, conversations with neighbours, photographs, alley walking, and interactions with plants to make the case that lived experience in gardens is far more complex than normative understandings linked to property suggest. Further, I argue that by exploring the entanglements of property and plants in the landscape of gardens and alleys, we can find lived experiences that contradict harmful assumptions bound up in private property; assumptions that see tenants as incapable of improving property and that link tenancy, migrancy, and disorder.