Private Property In Land Research Articles

The Middle Class and the Land Struggle in Palestine

This article discusses the rise and failure of private horticultural farming by Palestinian leaders and middle-class developers in the Beisan valley in the 1930s. This focus broadens and deepens our understanding of the colonial encounter in Palestine. Although the Palestinian middle class appears prominently in the political narratives of the struggle, this group has been paradoxically deemphasized in the social history of capital and settler accumulation and dispossession. By correcting this bias, the article seeks to develop a more inclusive narrative concerning private property in land in the settler-colonial predicament as a process of double loss: of Indigenous land relations and ecologies, on the one hand, and national life and territory, on the other. To do so, the article privileges an actor-based history, which captures both the development of political and economic practices and traditions, as well as the long and deep effects of governmental structures of dispossession.

On land, life, and labour: Abundance and scarcity in Locke, Smith, and Ricardo

On land, life, and labour: Abundance and scarcity in Locke, Smith, and Ricardo

The Dream of Property: Law and Environment in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

Abstract This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. It demonstrates how The Dying Grass and Almanac of the Dead critique this legal imagination while also using it as a model for changing environmental politics through discourse.

Dispossession without displacement: Producing property through slum redevelopment in Bengaluru, India

The paper examines the role of slum redevelopment in the production of private property in land in a fast-growing city of southern India. Drawing on an in-depth case study in Bengaluru, we show that the tenurial rights of slum residents were eroded when the contested land on which they lived – which was layered with multiple rights and claims of various actors – was confirmed by the court as the sole property of an individual who claimed to be its owner. The transformation of the plot into private property and therefore into a fungible asset, free of encumbrances, allowed the landowner, the political entrepreneurs who spearheaded the redevelopment project, and various intermediaries to capture most of the rapidly escalating value of the land. The exchange of recognized land tenure rights for small flats carrying conditional titles further excluded slum residents from ‘proper’ urban citizenship based on property ownership and exacerbated the precarity of their lives in the city. In this case, in-situ (on the same site) slum redevelopment is shown to operate as a modality of enclosure in which the urban poor are displaced even while remaining in place – or a process of dispossession without displacement.

THE AIMS AND TRENDS OF THE SUSTAINABLE LAND TENURE FORMATION IN UKRAINE: THE SPATIAL ASPECT

The spatial aspect of the challenge of the sustainable land tenure formation has been scrutinized in the article. There is a set of unresolved issues at the point where interests of land owners, land users and the government clash, that witnesses the absence of effective mechanisms of the formed land tenure system improvement. At the transition to the market relations, with the private land property environment, new effective approaches to land redistribution and rational land use support are necessary. The research objective is the development of a complex approach to the land tenure spatial improvement for the sustainable development. Substantiation is carried out for the transition economy with Ukraine as an example. Land redistribution aiming at urban settlement area optimization and agricultural land tenure in the context of the social environment and economic benefit has been substantiated. The effectiveness of the spatial land improvement in the context of the national and local budget land fee revenues has been substantiated.

The interaction between informal and formal institutions: A case study of private land property rights in rural China

Informal and formal institutions coexist, interacting in a complex and dynamic manner. We examine whether informal institutions can still function without official recognition and how they impact formal institutions. Drawing on a quasi-natural experiment involving the private land system in rural China known as “ancestral land”, and using trust change to represent institutional outcomes, this paper discusses the dilemma of informal institutions. The results indicate that ancestral land induces the transition of rural residents’ interpersonal trust to contract-based trust and increases the marketization of land rentals, which is one goal of China’s current land reforms. However, ancestral land reduces rural residents’ institutional trust and perceived security of tenure, and even hinders the new round of land titling. Our analysis implies that, although induced institutional innovations optimize the governance of the commons and increase the efficient allocation of production factors, the lack of official recognition is an obstacle to its potential.

Private Landed Property and Finance: A Checkered History

AbstractThis article examines the links between private property in land and the financial system. Private landed property (PLP) has played an important role in supporting the growth of modern banking and credit systems, industrialization, and economic democratization. However, since the 1980s, high‐income economies have exhibited a strong preference for PLP as a form of tenure, in the form of home ownership in particular. This pattern has combined with financial liberalization and innovation to create a land‐finance feedback cycle with negative social and economic outcomes. They include a housing affordability crisis for younger and poorer socioeconomic groups; rising wealth inequality as land rents have become more concentrated; economic stagnation due to capital misallocation; and increased financial fragility as household debt has exploded. We illustrate these historical processes in the Anglo‐Saxon “home‐owning democracies,” where they have been strongest, focusing in particular on the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States. This article considers how alternative tenure arrangements and reforms to finance and taxation could help mediate these dynamics.

Neo-classical liberalism, ‘market freedom’, and the right to private property

ABSTRACT Neo-classical liberals aim to offer a more consistent, coherent, and morally ambitious form of liberalism than the traditional classical and social liberal alternatives by providing grounds for a strong commitment to both individual economic liberty and social justice. The key neo-classical liberal claim is that the stringent protection of negative economic liberty does not conflict with, but is rather an essential component of, a commitment to political and social justice. My focus in this article is not on this key neo-classical claim itself, but rather on the conceptually prior question of the meaning and institutional implications of the negative conception of individual economic liberty. In addressing this question I trace some lines of argument which derive from the classical political economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing in particular on ideas and arguments developed by the American economist and social critic Henry George, I argue that a fully coherent and defensible conception of negative economic liberty is compatible with a commitment to a strongly conditional form of private landownership, but is incompatible with a commitment to absolute private property in land.

Modelos de propiedad de la tierra y resguardos indígenas en la conformación del Estado moderno. Pasto, 1855-1879

Este artículo analiza la convergencia de criterios entre los modelos de propiedad colectiva y privada en los terrenos de resguardo en algunas zonas del territorio correspondiente al actual departamento de Nariño durante un periodo caracterizado por la implementación de políticas liberales basadas en los principios del derecho individual, la liberalización de la propiedad y la igualdad jurídica. El texto estudia los modelos de propiedad en la legislación, en los conflictos por terrenos de resguardo y en la práctica judicial. Plantea que el modelo de propiedad privada fue ganando espacio, pero no primacía, conformando una propiedad a medio camino entre las nociones colectiva y privada.

The New Chinese Property Rights Law: An Evaluation from a Continental Perspective

On October 1, 2007 – the 48th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – the Property Rights Law of the PRC (hereinafter “PRL” or “Property Rights Law”) entered into force. The symbolic date clearly expresses the importance of this law, which was fourteen years in the making and of much interest both within China and internationally. The central thrust of the law is the protection of private property through the “socialist market economy” of the People’s Republic of China, which has been widely commented upon and is the law’s major political essence. Due to the law’s orientation towards German Law – in its basic structure and many individual provisions – this article uses Continental and especially German law to explain its major features and peculiarities. Registration requirements for real property rights and real rights for security will in the future be unified – the registration system, at least in the cities, leans on a German system, but does not copy it. The Regulations on residential property developed elements of different legal systems as the basis of a future Chinese solution. A reform of land use rights includes gestures towards the creation of private property in land (at least from an economic viewpoint) – altogether a major step forward not only towards the enactment of a comprehensive Chinese Civil Code but also on the long road of shaping a Chinese rule of law.

‘Dehumanized housing’ and the ideology of property as a social function

For about 250 years, private property has been ideologized as an instrument of the owners’ power to exclude. The most popular expression of the ideology of exclusion (although not his exclusive invention) is attributed to Sir William Blackstone. Speculative vacancies, a recent development in the real estate industry criticized by the UN Special Rapporteur on housing, emphasize the anti-social ideology of Blackstonian property. The article suggests that an ideology proposed by the French jurist Léon Duguit should be considered as an alternative. Based on the teachings of Comte and Durkheim, Duguit rejected the idea of property as a right and treated property as a social function. His views offer spatial planners new opportunities to define the content and boundaries of private property in land.

The Entanglement of Sovereignty and Property in International Law: From German Southwest Africa to the Great Land Grab?

Although sovereignty and property had emerged as clearly separated legal concepts at the time of German colonial expansion, with the acquisition of sovereignty requiring either the conclusion of treaties with other sovereigns, or the effective occupation of territorium nullium, their relationship was a lot closer in actual colonial practice. For the German colonial administration, ownership and control of private property in land was fundamental not only for the economic exploitation of the colony, but for acquiring territorial sovereignty in the first place. To a considerable extent, the effectiveness of Germany’s occupation derived from its control over property through the acquisition of property and the establishment of a property regime. The incremental land grab achieved a level of control, which Germany’s insufficient military deployment would not have achieved alone. Recognizing this role of property in the acquisition of sovereignty, one might feel inclined to support neo-marxist theories about property rights as a vehicle ensuring the original acquisition of the means of production (as well as the surplus value created by them). Hence, German colonialism in Southwest Africa looks like a thoroughly capitalist project. Intriguingly, the property regime faithfully reflected the specifically German variety of 19th century capitalism, which assigned a strong role to government intervention and control. Nevertheless, at closer inspection, the property regime established in Southwest Africa reveals an irritating fuzziness, which belies such simple explanations. This fuzziness consists in a series of loopholes, contradictions, and fundamental ambiguities pervading property law up until the confiscations following the Herero and Nama uprising. This observation is highly puzzling given that the Germans spared few efforts to establish a highly legalistic colonial regime. The paper argues that the fuzziness ultimately results from, and boils down to, the impossibility of establishing law in the context of a violent colonial conquest. Resorting to psychoanalytical theories of law pioneered by Jacques Lacan, one might understand the colonial property regime as a symbolic order that hides the brutality emanating from our imaginaries. Its fuzziness is the “damn’d spot” that does not wash off, a reminder of the contradiction inherent in the attempt to justify the unjustifiable, legalizing the illegal, in short, of the systemic violence pervading colonialism. Along this line, the article argues that the 1904-1907 genocide constitutes the culmination of insoluble tensions reflected in the property regime. Colonial law thus reveals itself as a field of intense struggles. While one should not overlook the character of property law as an instrument of colonization, it also reflects many of the contradictions of colonialism, of the attempts to justify the unjust. Tragically, these tensions still pervade the land question in today’s Namibia, only to be exacerbated by contemporary land grabs.

Private Property and the Defiance of Natural Limits. Coastal Flooding in the United States' Largest City

Abstract Three cities account for nearly one-third of average annual flood losses and all are located in the United States. One of those cities is New York. New York arrived in this situation because of the advent of property in under water land and the more general establishment of private property, which underwrote the city's surging real estate market. Private property would not exist but for state power and the legal instruments that made it possible. When private property in land entered the world of exchange, problems, such as the loss from coastal flooding, required the intervention of the state, which in New York as well as the United States has been more concerned, especially over the last three decades, with supporting capital at the expense of people and nature. Increased vulnerability to disaster under global capitalism has been the result.

The determination of the \u201ctrue\u201d property boundary in planned development: a Coasian analysis

This interdisciplinary paper, informed by research and practices in neo-institutional economics, property law and land surveying, is an exploratory account of the boundary as (a) the ontological foundation of private property in land and boundary dispute resolution, and (b) as a pre-contractual condition of any Coasian exchange of rights for planned urban development and space-relevant innovations. Under conditions of positive transaction costs according to the third Coase Theorem, with the help of real-life examples, the paper explains the choice of using the courts, instead of the market, as a means of resolving disputes over land boundaries. It does so in terms of two land surveying and three economic reasons. The surveying reasons are historical and cartographical. The economics reasons relate to the price level of land, the transaction costs of enforcing dispute resolutions and the externalities of land boundary determination.

California’s Groundwater Regime: The Cadiz Case

Recent California legislation has promised solutions to longstanding problems in groundwater management through an emphasis on management of groundwater itself, rather than on the rights of overlying property owners. In this short communication, I argue that the promises of scientific management relies on property law and jurisdiction and therefore that scientific claims about the water itself are less important than private property claims in the case of a Cadiz Inc.’s proposed groundwater extraction project in Southeastern California. While private property in land insulates Cadiz Inc. (Los Angeles, CA, USA) from political contestation, opposition to the project has increasingly focused on the right to transport and transfer water through lands not held by Cadiz Inc. This legal strategy points to how California groundwater law is still fundamentally ruled by private property in land, which shifts the grounds of environmental politics from extraction itself to the transport of extracted materials. This case serves as a good example of the intersection of political ecology and legal geography.

The Purposes of Land Settlement in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1898–1914: Drawing Paths through the Weeds

ABSTRACTThis article examines the programme of land surveying and registration that was undertaken by the British-led administration of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in the period 1898–1914. The Legal Secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, stated that programme was the most important project of his division in this period. Scholars have shown that the programme, known as land ‘settlement’, was used to build alliances with elites and to clarify title for European investors in the new irrigation scheme at Gezira. This article argues that, as such, the ambitions of land settlement were relatively limited. In many other colonies, and in Britain itself, politicians and administrators across the political spectrum saw the reform of private property in land as the key for addressing structural problems in agricultural labour. One might have thought that, the Sudan, land settlement might have provided a means of addressing the dependence on slave labour in agriculture. The article demonstrates that, except for a small number of administrators (including Bonham Carter), this was not the case. The general indifference to slavery itself carried through to an indifference to the transformative potential of land law. The article examines the proposals of this minority of administrators, and contrasts their views with the majority’s focus on land settlement as demonstration and opportunity to enhance state power.

Distance matters: mobilities and the politics of distance

Distance constitutes one of the foundations of geographical discourse, and yet it is among the least discussed of these foundations. Rather than contemplating distance as an explanatory tool, the paper takes distance itself, as well as its development and implications, as requiring explanation in their own right. It looks at the role played by definitions and measurements of distance in the production of territory and private property in land; in the governing of moving bodies; and in the phenomenological and affective design of space. The paper’s main argument is that distance should be de-constructed and re-politicized by being brought back into the field of mobilities.

Dialética da propriedade fundiária privada no Brasil dos oitocentos

O objetivo desta investigação é o de analisar a propriedade fundiária privada, particularmente a urbana, mediante as conjunturas políticas que foram sendo estabelecidas durante o final do período Colonial, no período Imperial e no decorrer da Primeira República. Assim sendo, podemos conjecturar que a dialética da propriedade privada no Brasil durante o século XIX assume processos de ocupação e apropriação territorial como partes integrantes da sistemática de construção e consolidação do Estado brasileiro e da formação das classes sociais do país. O papel desempenhando pela iniciativa privada (ou pública) no tocante à ocupação de terras, bem como à maneira como as políticas governamentais foram adaptando a “questão da terra” em função da pressão exercida pelas camadas predominantes no meio rural e urbano atesta a participação dinâmica da sociedade na definição das posições assumidas pelo Estado relativamente a esta problemática. Como parâmetro de estudo para o presente artigo tomamos como referência a cidade de Ribeirão Preto, interior do estado de São Paulo, e algumas cidades vizinhas a ela.

Introduction: Expand or Die: The Revolution's New Empire

The William and Mary Quarterly and Journal of the Early Republic's joint issue centers on a theme, "Writing To and From the Revolution," that invites consideration of the revolution's transformative impact. On balance, this introduction argues, the issue's articles emphasize continuities over change. A focus on the fallout from a long-lasting civil war, American revolutionary leaders' efforts to raise funds via western land sales, Indian resistance, and the challenges presented by western settlers offers another perspective. The American Revolution promoted the linkage of three increasingly interdependent social processes: first, the hardening of racial distinctions to associate freedom with whiteness; second, the regularization of state formation to balance the interests of older states with the longing of new state elites for secure private property in land and slaves; and third, the escalation of westward expansion to relieve social tensions and reduce taxes in the eastern polities. The beneficiaries celebrated the results as freedom and prosperity, which they considered the republican fruits of their revolution. But that success contained contradictions that would provoke a new civil war, even bloodier and more destructive than the revolution.

Некоторые особенности экономического развития села в Восточной Галиции в 20–30-х годах хх века

The article deals with the agrarian policy of the Polish government of the interwar period, which was intended to reform the agricultural system to increase productivity of agricultural production, the development of commodity-money relations and the activation of cooperative movement. The governmental policy has led to the formation of a land market, creating conditions for the origin of independent farms of different types and sizes, which were based on a private property of land. The main component of the agricultural policy of the government was colonization, which was intended to strengthen the eastern borders of the Second Polish Republic by creating economies of the colonists. They have become a social and political support for the government on the “Eastern lands.” This state policy influenced hostilely on millions of the local Ukrainian population. In despite the understanding of a significant number of Polish politicians and scientists such activities harm to the interests of the state, during the interwar period colonization of the land remained the main direction of agricultural policy. The Polish government has openly ignored the problems of the Ukrainian village, which led to a tangle of economic, national and social troubles that impacted on the Polish-Ukrainian aggravation of interethnic relations.