The Advantages of Ambiguity? Development,Rule Formation and Property Rights During Transition in China

Legally protected individual private property rights and a constrained state are doctrines of neoclassical economics-derived development theory. But what about China? It lacks strong rule of law, property rights can be collective, contested and ambiguous, and the state is relatively unconstrained and maintains a central role in the economy; yet it has seen impressive economic growth to take it to the world’s second largest economy. I argue that in the absence of legal/rational protections of individual property rights, political and social networks can provide alternative methods of property protection, allowing for economic development – with political protection substituting for legal. The novel claim I make is that ambiguity of property rights can provide opportunities and spaces for development and innovation, with the building of meaning and institutions found in a transitional state, where rules are unclear and contested, and where formal rules can “catch up” if apparent success can be demonstrated.     

SQUATTING ON GOVERNMENT LAND

This paper presents an economic theory of squatter settlements in developing countries. It adds to the existing literature by explicitly modeling squatting on government‐owned land and presents a unified framework for analysis of issues related to squatting, urban planning and policy. In the model, a squatter‐organizer optimally controls squatting so as to forestall eviction. The model highlights how the existence of an eviction cost leads to formal residents tolerating squatting, trading‐off “open space” to avoid paying taxes toward evicting squatters. The paper derives comparative‐static results under some functional form assumptions. The analysis is extended to examine the comparative‐static effects for the case where squatters freely migrate into the city. The framework for exploring a combined model of squatting on government and private land is also laid out. Finally, some policy analysis of squatter formalization is carried out.     

Reciprocal Repossession: Property as Land in Urban Australia

Repossession of land by Indigenous people is commonly understood as a legal act that unfolds within the confines of state apparatuses. But for many Indigenous urbanites, legal repossession is both impossible and irrelevant due to their histories of dispossession and dislocation. Moreover, while land repossession in Australia is predominantly non‐urban, I demonstrate that land is also reclaimed within cities. Urban repossession of land, considered here as reciprocal rather than legal, challenges the model of private ownership by asserting a territorially transferable relationship to property as land. The order of property entrenches Indigenous people's dispossession by demanding immobility as precondition to ownership and rendering Indigenous urbanites all “too mobile”. Against this framing and the liquidation of their lands as capital, Indigenous people practice reciprocal forms of repossession that challenge both liberal and traditional meanings of ownership. This helps retrieve urban Indigenous subjectivities while compelling partial relinquishment of non‐Indigenous properties.     

Nuisance Talk and the Propriety of Property: Middle Class Discourses of a Slum‐Free Delhi

Abstract: This paper examines the narratives through which associations of private property owners in Delhi depict slums as zones of incivility and “nuisance.” In tracing how this “nuisance talk” travels into and gains legitimacy in popular and state visions of urban space, the paper shows the role of discourse in justifying and enacting exclusionary urban imaginaries. As a lay term, nuisance is widely used to identify forms of aesthetic impropriety. But, as a primary element of environmental law, nuisance operates discursively as a catchall category allowing diverse private grievances to be expressed in terms of environmental welfare and the public interest. The widening depiction of slums as nuisances hence reworks the public/private divide, inserting once local codes of civility into the core of public life. By examining how nuisance talk circulates between property owners' associations, the media, and the government, the paper shows how slum demolitions have become widely read as a form of environmental improvement.     

Ruling from afar: government and information management in late medieval Sicily

In 1412 Sicily lost its independence and became part of the Crown of Aragon. To rule the island, the new monarchs developed a system of long-distance government, through the action of local viceroys. But how did this system work in practice? This article engages with the lively historiographical debate about late medieval Sicily and more generally the Aragonese conglomerate by examining the series of libri quictacionum (‘books of quittances’) produced by the financial office, the Conservatoria regii patrimonii. It shows that the management of information – by means of a new genre of documents, an innovative record-keeping system and an apparatus of marginal annotations – became crucial in establishing effective government at a distance and in strengthening royal control over Sicilian institutions and officers. Moreover, these books and the documents they encompass highlight the social dynamics of the island and the emergence of an urban class: the Aragonese promoted the inclusion of the principal members of the latter into central government by granting them offices.     

The history of urban families in medieval England

Few medieval historians have turned their attention to the history of families in urban England. But the groundwork for such studies has been laid in previous scholarship on the merchant class, on women and work in towns, and on borough law and customs. Future studies, more specifically focused on families in towns, will draw upon a wide variety of sources including wills, property records, marriage litigation, coroner's rolls, poll taxes, borough customs, and, most importantly, borough plea rolls. These studies should allow us to explore how the special characteristics of the medieval urban environment – continual in-migration, economic opportunity, commercial and industrial diversity, extremes of wealth, high population density, and borough legal structures – affected family formation, life-cycle, demography, and domestic life in medieval towns.     

Common good and private justice: letters of marque and the utilitas publica in fourteenth-century Marseilles

Political debate, even in medieval Europe, has often centred upon the relationship between individual liberties and the greater good. Fourteenth-century town councils had to think about protecting private property while ensuring the greater public good. The council registers of late medieval Marseilles offer the opportunity for insight into this public–private dichotomy through an examination of the council's decisions to suspend temporarily the execution of letters of marque. In fourteenth-century Marseilles, letters of marque helped citizens gain restitution from foreign debtors through a judicial authorisation to seize foreign assets. The suspensions, justified in the language of the utilitas publica, were declared for two reasons: to protect the integrity of the town's market by ensuring an ample supply of labourers and victuals, and to protect the town's honourable reputation when dignitaries visited. Study of these suspensions illustrates an overarching philosophy in urban government – that the public good must be safeguarded against private advantage.     

Development-led planning practices in a plan-led planning system: empirical evidence from Finland

Planning systems are generally divided into plan-led and development-led systems. However, it is quite common that the planning practice follows development-led planning although the planning system would structurally be plan-led. To study how development-led planning affects the implementation of large-scale urban development projects, we conducted a cross-sectional survey in Finland – a country with a hierarchical setting of legally binding zoning plans which can be prepared by following either plan-led or development-led practices. The survey respondents were civil servants managing implementation of large-scale urban development projects. Our results quite surprisingly suggest that development-led planning may cause the projects to become more vulnerable to property market uncertainty compared to the projects following the plan-led practises. These results challenge the usual output-based legitimation of development-led planning to some extent.     

The monuments of Kings Cross: a visit to the new ruins of London

In his 1967 photo essay “The monuments of Passaic” the American land artist Robert Smithson presented a New York suburb as a seedbed of urban entropy. His research methods, publication strategies and reflections on decline provided a touchstone for the generation of cultural mappers that followed. But have theoretical expectations of metropolitan space perhaps shifted? Is it not in the city centre, rather than periphery, that decay is thought to set in? In which case, what forms – material, cultural, political – does it assume? And what, meanwhile, has become of the suburbs? In an inversion of the Passaic essay, this narrative takes the reader, first by train and then on foot in search of new ruins at the heart of a metropolis. The city is London and the destination Kings Cross, the largest building site in Europe and marketed as tomorrow’s neighbourhood of leisure and information. By way of an art practice, and through the lens of an art and architectural history, the paper reports on the site – its structures and objects, as well as the acts and interventions that the Kings Cross marketing machine has failed to sublimate.     

Un-real Estate: Proprietary Space and Public Gardening

Many contemporary neo-liberal urban programs are enacted in order to protect private property, structured according to a logic of property, or designed to extend the workings of private property to public domains. My focus is on the latter, especially in relation to the principles of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). Here, residents are encouraged to act in a proprietary way toward public space in order to expel anti-social forms of behaviour. Drawing on Oscar Newman's analysis of "defensible space", I document the link between CPTED and certain characterizations of property—that property is largely synonymous with private property, that it is communicated to others through clear acts, such as gardening, and that it is, or should be certain and clear. These principles, I note, echo hegemonic accounts of property. Perhaps for this reason, defensible space principles remain important to neo-liberal urban governance. I document their significance in relation to attempts to create a "Community Greenway" in inner city Vancouver. Drawing from interviews, I demonstrate that while residents did, indeed, lay claim to public space, they did so in complicated and collectivized ways that depart from the privatized certainties of neo-liberal notions of property. Such complications are also echoed in other accounts of defensible space. I conclude by urging geographers to take property more seriously, yet also acknowledge the overlapping and collectivized ways in which people can lay claim to urban space.     

Dealing with the past and planning the future: the urban renewal of Rome and Barcelona through the Olympic Games

Is there a link between Rome and Barcelona's past and their Olympic legacies? This article sheds further light on the two cities' urban renewals through the Olympics on the basis of a historical and comparative analysis, as well as through the lenses of regime theory. It argues that Rome's modest outcome and Barcelona's success can be linked to their capacity to deal with their controversial past. The article shows that this capacity played a major role in shaping the composition and equilibrium of the two cities' informal networks of local elected officials, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs who planned and implemented the Games (‘growth regimes’). The difficulties of Rome in coping with the Fascist experience resulted in a growth regime in which weak and divided public actors – split along the Fascist/anti-Fascist and Communist/anti-Communist lines – were unable to counterbalance private agents' interests. In contrast, Barcelona's ability to reconcile itself with the past – facilitated by the Spanish entry in the European Economic Community and by the end of the Cold War – eased the Francoist/anti-Francoist and the centralist/Catalan divides, hence allowing the public actors to promote a coalition around a project of ‘democratic restoration’ of the city which involved planners, local businessmen and citizens.     

Thailand’s Traditional Trinity and the Rule of Law: Can They Coexist?

Abstract

Thailand has seen considerable progress in the rule of law since the seminal 1997 constitution. Yet persistent political instability suggests that as yet the country does not think of the rule of law as binding. What is likely to happen in Thailand with the rule of law, and with governance generally? The argument advanced here is that rule of law principles must contend with the realisation that the traditional Thai trinity – nation, religion and king – has become an inviolable state ideology. Political actors, often aligned with the monarchy, have been using each element of the trinity to undermine both rule of law principles and democratic institutions. Now that long-serving monarch King Bhumibol (Rama IX) has been succeeded by his son King Varijalongkorn, it seems an appropriate time to examine current battles about the meaning of the rule of law and broader struggles for control between elites and popular groups based on competing visions for the state – a problem not only in Thailand but in the region as a whole.     

Private rental investment and socio-spatial disadvantage in Sydney,Australia

This article unpacks the connection between a growing cohort of small-scale but purposive property investors and urban socio-spatial restructuring. We analyse private rental housing as a tenure share to demonstrate its spatial correlation with the suburbanisation of socio-economic disadvantage in Sydney, Australia, between 1991 and 2016. Then, we show how investors drive this emerging pattern by reference to the geography of property owners’ stated investment objectives—low capital outlay, rental yields, and capital growth prospects. We contend that the link between their small-scale activities and the city’s changing socio-spatial structure is an overlooked consequence of private rental sector (PRS) housing financialisation. Importantly, our focus on behaviours exhibited by small-scale rental property owners in PRS financialisation transcends existing analyses that have concentrated on corporate entity activity in this space. That focus also contrasts with framings of private rental growth as a residual outcome of developments elsewhere in the housing market. Such work is significant because it demonstrates the impacts of real estate investment on urban form.     

基于小产权房居住满意度的实证研究——以南京迈皋桥地区小产权房社区为例

小产权房是一个涉及广泛民生,持续受到关注的社会热点问题。小产权房交易屡禁不止,是目前政策的难点之一。本文从城乡规划的视角出发,通过对南京市城郊结合部典型小产权房小区的实证调查,了解小产权房居民的居住状况和居住满意度。研究内容涉及小产权房居住区的社会构成,居民对小区外部环境、小区建设状况、小区社会生活的满意度状况,以及小产权房小区违规建设导致的问题,并针对居住品质改善提出建议。最后,从城乡规划的角度对现存小产权房的治理提出一些建议。     

Heritage-making ‘from below’: the politics of exhibiting architectural heritage on the Internet – a case study

The ‘digital revolution’ created new opportunities for private persons to participate in the public discourse on architecture and architectural heritage. But has this new ‘participatory culture’ also triggered democratic polyphony and a questioning of dominant (expert) values and knowledge? And when considering official Internet representations – is there a proactive policy involving citizens? Taking the ‘virtual life’ of the Vienna Werkbund estate (1932), a modernist icon listed as a national monument in 1978, as a case study, the present examination tempers exaggerated hopes. The analysis of private and official websites shows that new information and communication technologies foster the expression of different viewpoints only to a limited extent. Although residents use the Internet to voice criticism, actors situated outside expert culture primarily reaffirm the estate’s cultural value and act as co-producers of the dominant discourse. Focusing on official heritage, this paper not only provides evidence for the perpetuating function of new digital tools but also reveals the power relations that underpin paternalistic cultural mediation. Given the technological possibilities of involvement, it criticises official web representations for the exclusion of ‘the public’ and raises the fundamental question of what the digital mediation of cultural heritage in democratic societies should look like.     

The Squatters' Movement in Europe: A Durable Struggle for Social Autonomy in Urban Politics

Squatting empty properties for living or to develop public activities has lasted in European cities for more than three decades. Although local and national contexts differ significantly, there are also some general trends and patterns that deserve careful attention. When squatting occasionally appears in public debates, controversy is generated and many gaps open between academic, social and political perceptions. In this article I use evidence from several European cities to argue that the squatters' movement has produced an original impact in urban politics. The main feature of this impact has been to generate a relatively wide autonomous and mainly non‐institutional mode of citizen participation, protest and self‐management. How has this been possible? Which are the specific contributions made by this urban movement? These are questions that both scholars and activists continuously claim to be relevant, so that this research attempts to offer some general answers based on detailed comparisons and experiences.     

Looking Forward by Looking Back: May Day Protests in London and the Strategic Significance of the Urban

This paper deals with the question of how oppositional movements can adapt their protest strategies to meet recent socio-spatial transformations. The work of Lefebvre provides several clues as to how an alternative discourse and appropriation of space could be incorporated in such protest strategies. One of the central themes in Lefebvre's work is that the appearances, forms and functions of urban space are constitutive elements of contemporary capitalism and thus that an alternative narrative of urban space can challenge or undermine dominant modes of thinking. What exactly constitutes the "right" kind of alternative discourse or narrative is a matter of both theoretical and practical consideration. The paper analyses one case: the May Day protests in London in 2001, in which a protest group, the Wombles, managed to integrate theoretical insights into their discourse and practice in a highly innovative manner. Since cities, and global cities in particular, play an ever more important role in maintaining the consumption as well as production practices of global capitalism; they potentially constitute local sites where global processes can be identified and criticised. It is shown that the Wombles effectively made use of these possibilities and appropriated the symbolic resources concentrated in London to exercise a "lived critique" of global capitalism. Since the Wombles capitalised on trends that have not yet ended, their strategies show a way forward for future anti-capitalist protests.     

Rescaling regions in the state: The New Regionalism in California

A “new civic regionalism” – based on participatory, inclusive and partnership models of governance – has recently been rolled out in California to tackle the challenges of urban growth, planning and economic development across the State's diverse metropolitan and rural regions. Backed by non-profits and private foundations, California's New Regionalism has been packaged as a flexible and responsive grassroots governance initiative, which is designed to circumnavigate State and local government. Its proponents have been influenced by New Regionalist ideas and practices circulating nationally and internationally. Despite this, our explanation for the rise of the New Regionalism in California is not grounded in these wider theoretical and policy developments; nor do we see it as the outcome of a “new politics of scale” framed around the region. Instead, California's newest regionalism is part of a much longer-standing social movement spearheaded by large-scale business interests and directed at reorganizing local and State government powers particularly in urban regions. This regional reform movement has sought to rationalize land use and environmental planning, coordinate infrastructure, and make government more fiscally efficient and responsive to growth. Over the longer term, its efforts have been undermined by the fiscal fallout of the property tax revolt, Proposition 13. Our analysis calls into question some of the claims in the literature on state rescaling and suggests the value of collapsing the conceptual distinction made between new spaces of political regionalism and regional economic spaces.     

The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom

There exists an influential and growing political‐economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.     

Property Rights for Biodiversity Conservation and Development: Extractive Reserves in the Brazilian Amazon

Many of the world's most valuable biodiverse areas are successfully managed by indigenous communities, often under peculiar property rights structures. In many cases, these communities are economically disadvantaged, even by local standards. But can particular local property rights regimes which are ecologically successful also allow communities to compete productively in market economies? The extractive reserves of the Brazilian Amazon offer an opportunity for investigating the connections between property rights, conservation and development in the context of tropical forests. This article aims to analyse whether the existing property rights in these reserves — an idiosyncratic mixture of public, collective and private property rights — can support the explicit development aim of a competitive, yet sustainable, exploitation of the area's natural resources. The analysis identifies three promising development paths open to extractive reserves, but points to a fundamental contradiction between the static structure of the property rights system and the dynamic nature of two of these paths. The current design of internal property rights fails to take into account the broader economic context in which reserves must generate a viable revenue stream. If extractive reserves are expected to develop without reliance on external aid, then changes to the property rights structure both inside and outside the extractive reserves have to be explicitly considered.