The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose
Anonymous
I came across this quite recently and I've been thinking about it
a lot. It seems to date from the period of the Enclosures in Britain,
when common land was taken into private hands and many poor people
lost their traditional rights of gathering and grazing. For such an
old-fashioned rhyme, which has the tone of a nursery rhyme or a proverb,
it seems startlingly relevant.
We're living through a new period of enclosures. All over the world,
public spaces are being taken into private hands: think of the difference
between shopping in a market and shopping at a mall. Mall space is
owned by a private company, who have the power to decide who walks
through it, who should be there and who shouldn't.
Recently in a mall in Hong Kong I was moved on by a security guard
for trying to sit down. I was told it was only permissible to sit
if I was buying a coffee in a café or a meal in a restaurant.
What happened to the right to sit and rest without paying? The erosion
of public space is about more than shopping malls. It's about a change
in our idea of what should belong to everyone by right and what can
be owned. Should the genetic code of an animal or plant be owned?
Should a river or a spring which supplies water to a town? What about
the air? These are the questions that we struggle over in the twenty-first
century, but they're not new. Not at all.
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