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AbstractThis article examines the legal geography of municipal bylaws regulating rooming houses in the City of Toronto. Using a legal geography analysis of Toronto's rooming house licensing bylaw, I argue that this bylaw is a ghost jurisdiction that designates part of the city as illegal and has implications for governance of the inner suburbs. In so doing, I push the debate on legal geography forward by suggesting that we, as urban scholars, take the temporal seriously in our analysis of space. Drawing from semi‐structured interviews, archival data and participant observation, I analyse seemingly mundane legal mechanisms through the case study of suburban rooming houses. Overall, in this article I make three contributions. First, I demonstrate how a temporal analysis is important to legal geography inquiries of uneven regulation and spaces of poverty. Second, I suggest that studies of legal governance are integral for redefining suburban governance amidst socio‐economic decline in the inner suburbs. Third, I argue that studying urban legal mechanisms in the suburbs is essential for moving beyond downtown analytical frameworks and is needed to address how low‐income suburban tenants, a large majority of whom are racialized newcomers, are unevenly regulated and unfairly governed by local government.

The space of the municipal library is changing. Libraries are no longer the traditional haven for quiet contemplation. In many cities across North America and the UK, municipal libraries have become a central social hub, a social service provider and a place of shelter for the marginal. In combination with technological advances and the hovering threat of budget cuts, the space of the library and the multiple publics it serves has becoming increasingly debated. We argue that the library and its changing mandate can be usefully understood through a property lens. The library is not only public space, we argue, but also public property. The manner in which the library, as public property, is enacted, is complicated most immediately by the competing conceptions of the 'public' that the library is to serve, but also by the ambivalent relationship between the 'public' and the 'private', and by the spatiality of the library itself. We demonstrate these complications in the context of changes to the sleeping policy in the Edmonton Public Library in Alberta, Canada (2014–2015).

The nexus between peacebuilding and development is widely acknowledged, and yet the two fields continue to operate differently in diagnosing destructive intergroup conflicts, as demonstrated by conflict analysis methods versus conflict assessment frameworks. This article juxtaposes conflict analysis, as illustrated by a problem- solving workshop on the Cyprus conflict, with a specialised conflict assessment workshop on an intergroup conflict in India. A comparative analysis based on participant observation in each workshop revealed basic similarities, but these were outweighed by important differences primarily related to differing assumptions about conflict causation (relationships versus structures). The implications for greater cross-fertilisation and the improvement of practice in both fields are identified. Adapted from the source document.

This article explores the intersection of geography, law and treatment through the lens of drug treatment courts. We show how the courts facilitate addiction treatment in part through specific definitions of urban spaces as either healthy or unhealthy. We argue that these definitions rely on the problematic notions that drug use is a geographically fixed activity and that neighbourhoods deemed unhealthy (because of either drug using or criminal activity) are essentially bad, void of any supportive features. These observations lead us to a broader framework of 'spatio-therapeutics' which is simultaneously productive and repressive.