Property, values, and the empirics of place

Diverse property patterns yield unique ‘maps’ of community and place. This paper explores the grounded implications such maps reveal; to canvass the ways in which bespoke private, public and common land patterns inform the values and sense of place of material communities. To measure property values to geographic space is an amorphous and difficult task, akin to catching the early morning mist in your hands. Drawing on cartographic tools as well as emerging property theory, this paper proffers several benchmarks by which property’s diverse values may be measured in situ. It then applies these potential indicators to ‘worlded’ place; three communities in regional New South Wales, Australia. These case studies illustrate how property lines and commensurate property values may (or may not) correspond, and their implications for a community’s sense of self. They also suggest that property’s many narratives, both dominant and subordinate, are capable of empirical (albeit imaginative) mapping to place.