Using a critical legal geography approach that incorporates theories on law, space, power, and infrastructure, my paper looks to conduct a ‘nomospheric investigation’ of a diverse set of human and non-human bodies, sites, and legalities spanning four jurisdictions: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia.
I specifically focus on how protests against both existing and upcoming infrastructural networks – such as the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, or more recent attempts by Extinction Rebellion – have created distinctly nomospheric ‘situations’ involving the securing of human and non-human bodies (such as pipelines or railroad tracks) through the usage of various devices (such as glue or chains).
While largely considered nonviolent in its formation, this messy bodily assemblage has been targeted through nomospheric ‘projects’ that attempt to securitise urban space by spatio-legally disconnecting these chimerical bodies, rendering them immobile. Such securitising projects either prohibit expansive acts of trespass against any objects considered critical infrastructure (in North America), or criminalise locking-on devices that connect human bodies to infrastructural ones (in the United Kingdom and Australia).
Using cases from each jurisdiction, I then turn to how nomospheric ‘technicians’ such as lawyers and judges contribute to these securitising projects by weighing up the need to secure urban space against the insecurities that the climate crisis evokes. These cases thereby produce and transplant notions of urban (in)security in the Anthropocenic era.