What Public Presence? Access, Commons and Property Rights

The development of a rigorous basis for what it means to be public in rural space depends in large part on the distinctive language and ideas of access and commons. Understandings of rural space that inform policy-making are peculiarly dominated by the rhetorical and political power of private property. It is access and commons that give an opportunity to confront this. The article draws on an example of a challenge by a landowner to the heralded public access provisions of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 to demonstrate the inadequate versions of access and the public presence that the current deference to private property is producing. The ensuing Public Inquiry was premised on an inadequate conception of public rights to space and a concomitant privileging of private property. In several ways the Inquiry set out deliberately to exclude the voices and claims of publics. The article identifies four primary areas in which the possibilities for promoting a new public presence in rural space via access and commons coincide.