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" For those of us living in big cities, snow days bring an array of old chairs, &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot; traffic cones, milk crates and trash cans placed in the street to save parking spaces. You&amp;#039;ve probably thought to yourself, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s up with that?&amp;quot; Or at least, &amp;quot;Do I really have to respect this guy&amp;#039;s cone of shame?&amp;quot; On the one hand, if you are going to put an old lawn chair in a street to save a parking space, you have to be willing to enforce your claim. That means there is, at least, a subtle threat of vandalism. On the other hand, the street is a public space. It&amp;#039;s pretty sociopathic to key someone&amp;#039;s car for parking in a spot you don&amp;#039;t really own. It turns out that someone much smarter than you has pondered this question. Her name is Susan Silbey, and she&amp;#039;s the head of anthropology at MIT. Silbey is a sociologist of law, which means she studies the explicit and unwritten rules that govern everyday life. While researching a book, she came across the practice of using furniture to mark space after a snow storm. It&amp;#039;s a pretty good example of an unwritten rule, because nearly everybody recognizes the meaning of a chair in the street.    &amp;quot;All of the elements of property, as a law professor teaches it, are invoked in the practices and accounts of space savers,&amp;quot; Silbey says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a claim about labor, and a claim about occupancy. It&amp;#039;s saying &amp;#039;I&amp;#039;ve given notice that something is mine.&amp;quot; The thing about using furniture to save parking spots was only a blurb in her book, but a picture of a chair in the street graced the cover. Friends began sending her pictures of the things people use to save space. Oddly enough, led to an online archive of pictures of things people use to save spaces. &amp;quot;There are toilet seats, televisions, buckets, chairs -- it&amp;#039;s mostly chairs,&amp;quot; Silbey said. &amp;quot;The famous one is the bust of Elvis Presley.&amp;quot; Silbey isn&amp;#039;t the only academic who has looked into the practice of calling &amp;quot;dibs&amp;quot; on a snowy parking spot. New York University libertarian NYU law professor Richard Epstein meditates on the practice of saving spaces in &amp;quot;The Allocation of the Commons: Parking and Stopping on the Commons.&amp;quot; His conclusion: &amp;quot;The conditions of scarcity (brought on by the snow) do result in a transformation of property rights in parking places,&amp;quot; Epstein writes. In a 2007 essay published in the Journal of Comparative Law, Silbey notes that cities with lots and lots of snow -- like Buffalo -- tend not to engage in space saving.    In cities where space saving does occur, it is quietly condoned by police and elected officials. &amp;quot;What the police take seriously are the disputes,&amp;quot; Silbey said. But, she says, officials occasionally try to stop space saving. Police in Philadelphia have tried to subtly remind residents that space saving is illegal using the hashtag #nosavesies. (It&amp;#039;s actually a pretty funny campaign. Look it up.) In 2004, officials in Boston ordered sanitation workers to remove items residents used as space markers. Residents responded by placing items in the street that trash men usually didn&amp;#039;t take -- like old refrigerators and toilets. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s perfect citizen resistance,&amp;quot; Silbey said. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a27651/parking-space-lawn-chair-okay/>