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Alexandra Flynn is an associate professor at UBC’s Allard School of Law and the director of the Housing Research Collaborative, where her teaching and research focus on municipal and property law. Joe Hermer is a criminologist and an associate professor in and chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He does research in the areas of policing, regulation, and state power, with a particular interest in vulnerable and street-involved populations. 

The issue #186 of The Internationalist, we feature an excerpt from The Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space. In this extract Flynn and Hermer reflect on how urban design tools like signage, tape, and barricades are not neutral notifications but active, material extensions of law that physically reshape public space to regulate behaviour, often invisibly targeting marginalized groups while omitting legal nuances like court-ordered exceptions.

REGULATING BEHAVIOUR THROUGH URBAN DESIGN  

Across Canadian cities, bylaws are framed as neutral regulations to maintain public order. Municipalities use signage and other visible markers to showcase bylaws in the everyday life of the city. Mariana Valverde reminds us that municipal bylaws are not minor or peripheral forms of law but key instruments of everyday governance. Rather than abstract codes, bylaws govern almost every aspect of urban life, through rules about noise, parking, loitering, and the use of parks. Seen this way, the signage, tape, and barricades that municipalities deploy around encampments exemplify what Valverde identifies as the practical, spatial operation of the law. They are active ways of shaping urban life and delimiting who may occupy public space. Signs, tape, and barricades reflect the materiality of bylaws, lifting the text of the bylaws from books to govern the lived geography of the city.

Nicole Graham’s concept of the “lawscape” is especially useful in showing how law is not simply imposed on pre-existing urban space but materially constitutes that space. Graham argues that law and landscape are co-produced: The organization of property rights, zoning, and regulation come together to make physical environments what they are. Likewise, when it comes to homeless encampments, a park area surrounded by caution tape or public infrastructure that is rendered difficult to use is not just a park with added controls; it is a lawscape deliberately created through bylaw authority. The space itself is reconstituted as hostile, exclusionary, and temporary through the inscription of legal norms into the built form.  

Our discussion of signage also relates to the urban studies scholarship on hostile infrastructure, which is a form of urban design that seeks to alter the behaviour of those in public space. For example, armrests have been added to park benches so that people do not sleep on them and water sprinklers may be added to lawns to prevent people from lingering too long on the grass. Some infrastructure is even more pronounced. Large public art or decorative rocks may be placed in areas that officials do not want people to use or traverse. Many hostile infrastructure tactics are seemingly invisible unless one is aware of these elements or has experience using the infrastructure in another way. In other words, the structures blend into the built form seamlessly, even while they also control behaviour. Thus, people may not realize the extent to which they are interacting or complying with hostile infrastructure. This type of infrastructure has negative impacts on the most marginalized members of society. While municipal design choices are relevant to how people engage with public space, including undoubtedly affecting those in encampments, we focus here on how cities assert their power explicitly through the visuality of bylaws. We narrow in on two ways in which municipalities make bylaws clear: signs, on one hand, and tape and barricades on the other. 

GOVERNING ENCAMPMENTS THROUGH SIGNAGE

As encampments have proliferated across Canada, signage and other visual tools have become important components of how municipal bylaws govern public space. For instance, a municipality may erect signage on park lawns showing that tents are not permitted. These signs often cite the bylaw the municipality is seeking to enforce. Sometimes the signs state which section of a park’s bylaw prohibits obstructions and may even include the text of the bylaw. Signs may have visuals, such as a tent sketch with a strikethrough red line across it.

Figure 1 offers an example of how a local government may communicate a bylaw. Here, a sign erected by the Vancouver Park Board in 2024, during the active enforcement of bylaws, details the provisions applicable to those in CRAB Park. The text is small, technical, and hard to read, showcasing the numerous so-called neutral rules that apply to these specific residents who have lived in the park for months or even years.

Signs seem to simply communicate who may use the space when in fact the details are more complex. Often missing from the signs are the nuanced rules that have been established by courts to explain when bylaws are unenforceable. As mentioned in Chapter 3, courts in British Columbia have consistently applied the outcome from Victoria (City) v. Adams — that a bylaw may be unenforceable at night if accessible shelter spaces are insufficient for those in an encampment. Ontario courts have made similar findings in recent cases, for example in Kingston and Waterloo; moreover, what qualifies as accessible continues to evolve in the courts.

Excerpted with permission from The Bylaw State: Encampment Evictions and the Struggle for Public Space by Alexandra Flynn and Joe Hermer. Published by Fernwood Publishing, 2026. 

The Internationalist Archive