Reconsidering law at the edge: How and why do place‐managers balance thrill and compliance at outdoor attraction sites?

• Published in: Area (London 1969) 2021-12, Vol.53 (4), p.611-618
• Main Author: Bennett, Luke
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Aesthetics; atmosphere; Attraction; Balancing; Compliance; Contingency; edgework; Geographers; Geography; legal geography; Legislation; place‐managers; practice theory; pragmatism; Spatial analysis; Visitors
• ISSN: 0004-0894; 1475-4762
• DOI: 10.1111/area.12667

This paper challenges legal geographers to go further in their claimed rejection of legal closure (the reduction of any situation to a purely legal dimension), by calling for greater exploration of how law’s command is always acting alongside and potentially subordinated to other spatio‐cultural normative influences. The insights of this advocated approach are illustrated using examples drawn from the author's fieldwork conducted across a variety of outdoor attraction settings, which have explored how place‐managers frame, arrange, and present their sites by reference to individual goals and communal interpretive practices deriving from multiple normative drivers. It is argued that this plurality of influences requires place‐managers to act as edgeworkers, developing a finely tuned understanding of how to manage the potentially hazardous co‐presence of visitors’ bodies and physical edges at their sites. This requires active balancing of their interpretation of (and compliance with) broad commandments for their sites to be “reasonably safe,” with the requirements of other pressing normativities, including those set by landscape aesthetics that demand that visitors must be presented with an appropriately thrilling experience. Recent trends in the development of contemporary legal geographic analysis, each of which are suggestive of an increasing attentiveness to law’s limits, are considered in order to develop this critique of conventional legal geographic practice and in support of the potentiality of the recommended new focus, specifically: legal geography’s “contingency orientation” (Orzeck & Hae); emerging interest in the “edge of law” (Jeffrey); and in the purposeful creation of normative atmospheres and law’s dissimulation there (Philippopoulos‐Mihalopoulos; Pavoni). Through these analytical lenses place‐manager’s active and skilful edgework becomes both more visible and more understandable as a dynamic situational balancing of compliance with safety laws and with the satisfaction of thrill and desire. This short paper calls for legal geographers to give more attention to how place‐managers transpose legal requirements onto their sites, and what interpretative and emotional resources they use to do so. It emphasises the importance of other normative drivers, alongside those of law, in the formation and maintenance of places.