Abstracts
NICHOLAS BLOMLEY
Why and how property matters to planning.
Property, understood as a set of relations between people in regards to a valued resource, such as land, is of crucial importance to social life, practices and belief. Planning and urban design would appear to be closely entangled with, and productive of property relations. Yet planning practice imagines itself as distanced from property, except in a narrow sense. It is thus imperative to understood what property is, and how planning and design might best relate to it. This is not easy, however. Property is a slippery concept, capable of multiple meanings. I view property as a human institution, productive of and produced within particular social contexts. It does not lie outside these contexts, but is performed and enacted in various ways. One crucial performance of property, I note, is a representational one, framing property in a narrow sense (as private, individual, and separate). Complicating representations of property as a means for the resolution of disputes, I note its conflictual nature, both ontologically (‘what counts as property’) and practically (‘what does property do’?).
I trace the work that property does through a case study of a rezoning and design conflict in Chinatown, Vancouver, tracing the tension between the way planning conceived of and acted upon urban space and the very different ways in which local activists framed the issue. A practice that centred on buildings, zoning, and parcels of property collided with an argument centred on property’s power relations, its implication in place and history, and its collective as well as private dimensions. The latter arguments, however, cut against the grain, given planning’s implicit embrace of a particular conception of property. The effect, I suggest, was to make such counter arguments harder to make.
DAVID CORREIA
The Fetishism of Common Property and its Secret
Liberal arguments regarding land as property usually depict common property and private property as contradictory property regimes. The private ownership of land defines exclusive rights that include the right to exclude and the right to alienate and thus is seen as the engine of private accumulation. In contrast, common property is condemned as its opposite: it limits individual rights and imposes instead indivisible rights to land ownership in ways that impede capitalist progress. Liberal formulations usually understand property as a legally defined relation between an owner and a thing, in this case land. According to critical legal theorists, however, land ownership, whether common or private, defines a set of social relations. This view understands common property and private property as commensurate rather than contradictory. Both define exclusion (though at different scales) and both describe individual rights (though defined by different use rights or spatial boundaries). Surprisingly, popular thinking among even radical land grant activists in property struggles in New Mexico, USA locate common property, in opposition to private property, as the wellspring from which transformative social relations can spring in ways that draw on, rather than critique, liberal theories of property in efforts to oppose the baleful effects of private property. This paper returns to Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism in Capital, Volume One as a lens though which to examine these property struggles.
AYONA DATTA
The elusive struggle for the legal city: Squatters, tenure and the myth of resettlement in Delhi slums
Since 2000 successive Supreme Court rulings in Indian cities have labelled slum dwellers as ‘illegal’ and ‘pickpockets’ of urban land and thus ineligible for any compensation or resettlement. In this context an emergent social activism led by grassroots NGOs and slum organisations have organised in defence of slum communities, arguing that resettlement via legal tenure should be a mandatory provision when slum dwellers are evicted from their homes. This talk argues that while resettlement should be a fundamental right of squatters, it is however based on a popular ‘myth’ that resettlement provides inclusion within the ‘legal’ city. This myth is also a gendered myth since it valorises resettlement as a route to legal tenure while masking forms of gendered power and the everyday gendered exclusions in the lives of those who are resettled. Indeed, a valorisation of resettlement serves to bolster the neoliberal logics of the state which drive urban development policy and make squatters pay for substandard housing and services (electricity, water, sanitation) in resettlement colonies. Using the example of Delhi’s endeavours towards a slum-free city and through interviews with residents of a Delhi slum waiting for demolition and resettlement, I will argue that the ‘desire for resettlement’ among the squatters is an irony and utopia of home in an exclusionary city. This desire will remain an incomplete gendered project of ‘legitimate domesticity’ both for the squatters and for the state. I will conclude that resettlement by the neo-liberal state is now more precarious and insecure than it was ever before, and while it holds the promise of a legal right to the city, it also hides new forms of exclusions and inequalities.
ERIC DENIS
Ordinary occupancy contested and property engineering from Indian’s city to Egypt: Scale, democracy and inclusive planning
In the context of City Debates 2014 titled “Of Property and Planning,” I will engage with the question of property and irregular settlements redevelopment, bringing a comparative perspectives from South Asia. How India’s titling policy and slum Free City program experiences and practices inform potential transitions in urban planning after the Arab Springs? Within the largest democracy in the world where decentralization instruments are potentially framing the condition for popular participation, justice and transparency, how far urban reforms supposed to include in situ redevelopment and titling have change daily life and security of tenure for the ordinary and the poor? On the ground not much have change, resettlement and eviction are yet the dominant answer especially in metrocities where land value and real estate pressures are very high, and where local government turns toward land asset management. Urban planning is formatted by a strict and unquestionable dichotomy between private and public property which leaves the local occupancy invisible and illegal even if it tends to constitute the majority’s living condition. There is certainly more to learn from the banal situation of negotiated occupancy urbanism and smooth titling in the multitude of banal small and medium towns. Ordinary locality where the social embeddedness of land relation hasn’t been completely skips out, occupation and land tenure are consolidated. The question then becomes how to legitimate the quiet socialisation of relation to land in more contested terrains. It passes certainly through the recognition and supports of capabilities and claims of local residents. It supposes also to question the state apparatus legitimacy to enforce a private and public property regime with its colonial legacy which erased local common properties. Primacy of the local practices, possession and socialisation of land use have to be (re-)recognised. Titling procedure and injunction to participate will not transform the tyranny of property regime. The reintroduction of a third space would question urban planning routines and mapping practices where local quiet possession/occupancy is yet denied or/and unseen.
MONA FAWAZ
The Politics of Property in Planning: Hezbollah’s Reconstruction of Haret Hreik (Beirut, Lebanon) as Case Study
This research looks at post-2006 war reconstruction of the southern suburbs of Beirut under the auspices of Hezbollah (the Islamic resistance in Lebanon). The project was widely acclaimed as an alternative to current neoliberal planning practices in the Middle East and beyond. Based on a critical reading of the conception of property issues in this planning project, the article argues that this reconstruction presents a new geometry or alternative-to-the mainstream configuration of neoliberal urbanism, rather than a departure from its precepts. This is because the adopted language of property corresponds closely with the conception of property advocated by neoliberal planning, one that enshrines private, individual ownership as sacred and desirable and that works to strengthen its model in the city. I further argue that the ‘neoliberal planning regime’ within which Hezbollah’s urban intervention occurs is not accidental; rather, it is necessary for the party to control the future becoming of this space and consolidate its territory in the city. It is hence expected that Hezbollah’s planning will produce in the city the same decried effects of neoliberal planning on the city elsewhere rather than usher an innovative, progressive model of planning.
Edesio fernandes
A step towards the right to the city? An assessment of Brazil’s 2001 City Statute
It has been increasingly acknowledged by legal scholars and urban researchers alike that the dominant pattern of combined sociospatial segregation and informality that has profoundly marked urban development globally has historically resulted to a significant extent from the exclusionary nature of the urban legal systems prevailing in most developing and transitional countries. In this context, policymakers, urban managers and social movements committed to the urban reform agenda have been asking a fundamental question: what does it take to make the national and local urban legal systems effective factors of sociospatial inclusion instead? A growing sociopolitical movement internationally has vigorously argued that the promotion of legal reform is necessary to support any significant attempts at urban reform. As a result, new urban laws governing land rights and management, territorial organization, planning, and housing have been enacted in several countries and cities in recent years, and a serious investment has been made by several non-governmental and governmental institutions towards the formulation, and approval, of inclusive legal systems in rapidly urbanizing countries. But, what exactly can be expected of these new urban laws? What is required for them to be fully enforced, and socially effective? What are the nature, possibilities and constraints of progressive urban laws vis-a-vis the broader sociopolitical process? This presentation aims to discuss such questions through a critical assessment of Brazil’s national urban policy law – the 2001 City Statute – which has been widely regarded as a groundbreaking effort to conceive a regulatory framework which is more conducive to providing adequate legal support to governmental and social attempts to promote urban reform. The City Statute was approved following 12 years of intense discussion and fierce disputes within and outside the National Congress. Since then, it has been acclaimed internationally, Brazil having won UN-HABITAT’s Scroll of Honour in 2006 for having approved it. Envied by policymakers and public administrators in several countries, the ambitious City Statute has been proposed by the Cities Alliance as a paradigm to be considered internationally. More than 10 years have passed since its approval, and a critical assessment of the conditions of its enforcement should provide important elements for the more general discussion on the growing, real as well as false, expectations existing around the newly approved urban laws.
Aziz Hallaj
Cadasters, Property and the Creation of Modernity in the Levant
The transition from the traditional process of court authentication of property rights to a modern system of cadasters was evolutionary and incremental. Over the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century the modern state institutions imposed a series of reforms to the cadastral records. These reforms did not simply improve the efficiency of the system, they actually transformed the very understanding of the concept of property. Moving from a complex tradition involving over 20 types of tenure and usufruct rights to a simple process of ownership did more than organize the technical records, it changed the very notion of property and coincided with purposeful projects to forge a new a new class of property holders and tax payers in the service of the new state apparatus.Through linking the process of land record documentation to major administrative and social transformation in the Levant in the Ottoman, into the French Mandate and post-colonial periods, the presentation will focus on the correlation between the rational spatial ordering and the political formation of the modern state. The question of ownership was always a contentious problem in Islamic jurisprudence that governed the production of social and political space. The presentation will thus also focus on how the process of modernizing the records confronted some of the challenges of defining property and how in the end it informed the process of secularizing the legal framework and challenging the religious institutions that controlled the mechanisms of legitimization for centuries. Yet the failure of the cadastral system to cope with increasingly more complex modern problems is signaling the limitation of the system itself, but more importantly, the limitation of the idealistic project of state building in the region. The issue of property is at the core of the social contract between citizens and state, this contract is fundamentally challenged today through the Arab Spring revolts and rebellions. Today the region is standing at the cross roads with various ideologies at play. The intertwining between the political, legal and socio-economic definition of property will help expand the dialogues on state building in the future.
Ozan Karaman
Contested trajectories of urban renewal in Istanbul
With the pretexts of increasing earthquake resilience and housing quality, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) administration in Turkey has initiated an ambitious program of urban renewal. This program targets not only low and middle income residential areas in the outskirts (largely areas that initially emerged as squatter settlements), but also decaying neighborhoods in central locations. The renewal model rests essentially on property-led redevelopment driven by authoritarian and increasingly centralized interventions of the state. Key agents of this effort are the Ministry of Urbanism and Environment, the Turkish Housing Development Administration (TOKI), and municipalities. The projects are typically announced without any prior consultation with or participation of the residents. Using examples from Istanbul, this paper will first explain the spatial and temporal aspects of disciplinary marketization through urban renewal, and contextualize the latter within the AKP’s urbanization-led growth strategies. I will then talk about grassroots mobilizations against different types of renewal schemes. My focus will be on the extent to which these are able to subvert planning interventions that are based on a strong ownership ideology and rent maximization and redistribution. I argue that there is no clean-cut opposition between grassroots resistance and neoliberal urban renewal, as the coercive core of urban renewal is often supplemented with efforts to incorporate existing property owners as development partners. I conclude with remarks on emergent popular mobilizations around claiming urban commons.
Alp Yücel Kaya
Politics of Cadastral Property Assessment in the Ottoman Provincial Towns in the Nineteenth Century
In the mid-nineteenth century a number of property surveys were embarked upon in some of the major commercial centers of the Ottoman Empire (Izmir, Salonica, Beirut, Bursa, Ioannina). Instituting a regularized property and income taxation system in general and shifting the tax burden from land to urban wealth in particular were the major intentions of these projects. They involved abolishing fiscal exemptions, replacing collective fiscal responsibilities by individual fiscal ones and subjecting different categories of property to a uniform system of taxation for the first time. This created a substantial resistance by certain urban actors (urban notables, merchants, property holders) benefiting from fiscal privileges/exemptions, and serving in the old regime as tax farmers or fiscal intermediaries between the state and tax payers. The central administration facing the difficulty of imposing and collecting taxes in the port cities in the 1840s and 1850s could nevertheless formulate a general cadastral regime in the 1860s. It consisted of nothing but negotiated administrative experiences resulting from fiscal resistances. The paper will therefore discuss first the evolution of this new property and cadastral regime on the basis of the resistance that structured it. Secondly, it will analyze working of cadastral commissions, which became crucial organizations of conducting cadastres in the Ottoman provincial towns in the mid-nineteenth century by emphasizing especially the question of cadastral property assessment. Finally, the paper will conclude with a discussion on fiscal techniques that Ottoman administration developed out of conflicts on property surveys and taxation in the nineteenth century.
NADA MOUMTAZ
Alienating inalienables, making the Muslim community: waqf exchanges during the reconstruction of Beirut’s Central District
This paper will examine the conceptions of property underlying the arguments that various Muslim groups, including the Directorate General of Islamic Endowments (Waqfs), put forward against the expropriation of waqfs during the reconstruction of downtown Beirut and against their replacement with stock in the private company in charge of reconstruction, Solidere. Opponents of waqf exchange drew on concepts from the Islamic legal tradition, arguing that the inalienability of waqf lies in its dedication as a charitable gift to please God, and that it is not an asset oriented towards endlessly generating profit. Their arguments seemed to advance a conception of property as an inalienable, very much linked to a certain geography and community, and opposed to the commodity profit-oriented conception of the dominant property regime under which Solidere was operating. Because the appeal to inalienability was successful and the DGIW was able to retain many of these inalienables, it might appear that there is space for alternative conceptions of property, not based on profit. Nonetheless, by examining in detail the way the DGIW recuperated these inalienables, I show that the process was much more complex: waqfs were abstracted and detached from their social geographies and submitted to the grammar of the dominant property regime, before being re-attached to an abstract “Muslim community” as inalineables. The paper thus suggests that it is important to analyze the grammar of the property regimes in which various property conceptions are embedded and operating.
MARTHA MUNDY
The urban in the rural: commodification, land-use and landscape in a village of S Lebanon (19th – 21st centuries)
Martha Mundy, Saker Elnour, Cynthia Gharios (from the AUB/IGESP & LSE/MEI Research project: The palimpsest of agrarian change, AUB PI Rami Zurayk)
After a few remarks concerning principles of analysis of property in land, the first part of the presentation will remind the audience of the variety of village forms of tenure in Ottoman bilad as-Sham. It will then problematize the history and historiography concerning village property in South Lebanon in particular. Crucial is the manner in which common Ottoman legal and administrative traditions first were translated on the ground across bilad as-Sham in the late Ottoman period and then subsequently were supplanted by distinct French and British cadastral and governance regimes in the Mandate states. The four successor states (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan) were to build quite different sets of property regimes, at least until the coming of neo-liberal orthodoxy and recirculation of oil rent into mass urbanisation in the later 20th century.
The second part of the presentation examines the case of a collective claim to land rights by former cultivators in a village owned historically by one landlord, telling the story of contestation, negotiation, and settlement from the 1970s to 2007. In this, initial mobilisation and claims expressed in terms of egalitarian (male) entitlement become translated into legal and administrative form, renegotiated through leaders articulating regionally/nationally with the landlord, and culminate materially in a bungalow-model urban sprawl on much of the better farmland of the village. In the last part of the presentation we abstract from this case to ask what are the effects on land-use, landscape and farming of the interplay of (1) the exportation of social and property conflict into class formation through international labour migration (international proletariat and merchant capital circulation), (2) the rules of property in force in the country, and (3) the character of rural land-administration (no zoning of agricultural land, taxation policy and urban planning model for village construction).
CHARBEL NAHAS
“Based on an extensive experience of CN as a researcher and public servant, his presentation outlines a strategy for introducing a land taxation strategy in Lebanon. the strategy includes: 1) an assessment of the economic, social and spatial implications of the prevailing land market rules, 2) the technical proposal of the draft law and its financial impacts, 3) the stakes and positions of the main actors”
Abir Saksouk-Sasso
Contesting National Authority in the Construction of Public Space: Dalieh or the making of Communal Spaces in Beirut
Since the end of the Lebanese civil war, Beirut has been undergoing new forms of ‘controlling’ public space. It has witnessed the gradual disappearance of coastal lands accessed by the public, as well as the closure of its largest public park, Horch Beirut. The control of public space in Beirut has gradually taken over the remaining social places in the city, in which an abstract public is consistently being served. Nevertheless, Beirut dwellers lay claim today to a number of open areas in the city, the uses of which are akin to ‘public’ spaces – in the sense that they are accessed freely and allow for an unconfined range of social activities. Access to these spaces is secured through social and communal agreements through which their uses are organized, rather than the laws and institutions of a central state. This paper advocates learning from the public by observing several left-over spaces in the city, in order to understand them as public, multicultural, just, and socially open. By focusing on the area of Dalieh in Beirut (as well as drawing parallels to the Kinayat in Saida), the paper attempts to abandon the modern notion of public space that is tied to ownership through the state’s attribution of designated spaces in the city as ‘park’, ‘garden’, or other named ascriptions. The paper hence opens new possibilities for understanding public space in Lebanon, yet also explores the ways in which these threatened spaces, such as Dalieh and Kinayat, can be preserved.
ANN VARLEY
Normalising informal settlements? Titling and the construction of everyday properties
After more than a decade of debates about property titling sparked by the appearance in 2000 of Hernando de Soto’s book The Mystery of Capital, the balance of academic and development practitioner opinion appears to have swung firmly in favour of alternative approaches to securing tenure. ‘Informal formalisation’ features intermediate forms of tenure, incremental approaches focusing on blocks or communities rather than individual house plots, and an emphasis on local or indigenous authorities rather than state agencies. Such trends in the policy-oriented literature dovetail with the current theoretical predilection for what political philosopher Elizabeth Pritchard (2000) calls ‘the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness’. Recent accounts of informality emphasise its provisionality and transience – shelter rather than dwelling – and celebrate the mobilities of the informal city as resistance to formalisation understood as normalisation, representing ‘the crushing weight of state domination’ (Simone and Boudreau 2008). It is often suggested that residents of informal settlements either reject titling or are simply indifferent to the alleged virtues of formalisation. In this paper, I argue, at a theoretical level, that the language of mobility informing such critiques of titling echoes the rejection of locatedness characterising the Western discourse of progress and development (represented, here, by de Soto’s concern that titling should release the assets ‘locked up’ in informal housing). Empirically, I argue that what is often missing from debates about formalisation is an engagement with what the people living in informal settlements themselves have to say about titling. I review evidence from interviews, questionnaire surveys and group discussions with residents in three of Mexico’s largest cities to explore their views, and I consider how those views compare with what people elsewhere have to say on the subject.