reinvigorating the concept of land tenure for american urban geography

Reinvigorating the Concept of Land Tenure for AmericanUrban Geography

Joseph Pierce*Clark University, Graduate School of Geography

Abstract

Tenure rights are durable privileges to use and benefit from specific pieces of land. In the USA,tenure rights are typically conceptually folded into the ‘bundle of rights’ associated with formalland ownership. Legally, this model rests on well-documented principles: private, serial, single-party property ownership and clear, well-regulated surveying. However, tenure does not beginand end in property. People negotiate the terms under which they use spaces – and the durabilityof those terms – through implicit and explicit social processes. Many geographers focused on UScities have tacitly conceded that existing forms of tenure are adequately captured in the concept ofproperty rights despite extensive discussion about the complex construction of non-property rightsin the development literature. This article argues that a vocabulary adapted from the conversationabout land tenure, specifically regarding use and usufruct rights, would enhance the ‘critical prop-erty’ literature by exposing additional, already-existing rights in land.

Tenure is a durable right or privilege to use land, sometimes including the products ofthe land (Feder and Feeny 1991). Various systems of rules which govern these rights andprivileges, or tenure regimes, are constructed through the interplay of political, legal, andsocial processes (Durand-Lasserve and Royston 2002a). Most scholarship exploring landtenure is focused on informal land use arrangements in rural communities within devel-oping regions (Fraser 2008), but tenure is neither merely informal nor merely a phenom-enon that exists in the global south. Rather, the phrase ‘tenure rights’ describes any set ofprivileges attached to units of land that is (at least somewhat) resistant to withdrawal –that is, rights that are to some degree durable. This paper argues that the vocabulary oftenure, and in particular notions of informal use and usufruct rights, allows scholars todescribe many configurations of relationships with land that are obliquely addressed inmost scholarship on US cities, even when scholars have been critical of conventionalconcepts of property.

Within American urban geography, two recent threads in the literature have offeredsubstantive critiques of conventional assumptions about urban land rights. One problema-tizes assumptions about the real-world universality of liberal property rights: here, variousalternative modes of ownership are highlighted, undermining the assertion that the hege-mony of property is as all-encompassing as is often claimed (Blomley 2005a; DeFilippis2004). The other calls for a new articulation of who may make use of the city: thesescholars articulate a ‘right to the city’ grounded in a notion of inhabitance rather thanproperty (Harvey 2004; Lefebvre 1996 [1968]; Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2003). Both ofthese critical strands make important contributions, and I argue here that adopting thevocabulary (and analytical perspective) of tenure-focused scholarship compliments bothcritiques. In particular, the specific, overlapping, informally negotiated non-property rights

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of urban users in existing, concrete places and spaces remain under-examined in theseexplorations of urban property and privilege.

Tenure rights do not comprise an alternative mode of property; neither are they fullycaptured by Lefebvre’s right to the city. While the liberal land market in the contempo-rary American context certainly contributes to the construction of tenure in US cities,social, non-market processes also shape the creation and maintenance of various userights, and more specifically of non-normative ⁄ illiberal tenure regimes, in North Ameri-can urban environments. The informal or social negotiation of urban land tenure regimes(and the dimensions of rights within them), as well as the variety of kinds of rights to useurban space that are not grounded in ownership, have been left insufficiently examinedby urban geographers in the US context as they work to understand (and critique)conventional property theorizations. This elision of the social contribution to the forma-tion and maintenance of tenure rights makes it easier to overlook the social regulation ofsocioeconomic phenomena such as housing and development policy in urban scholarship,as well as the effects on urban use that property-oriented public policy may introduce.

After explicating the concept of land tenure below, I explore how the concept ofproperty has often been assumed to serve the analytical role of tenure in American urbanscholarship, even in critical scholarship. Subsequently, I draw comparative examples fromsome accounts of the complexity of tenure in the global south. Finally, I propose what areinvigorated understanding of urban land tenure might entail for American urban geo-graphers.

Tenure in US Urban Scholarship: Orthodoxy and Critical Approaches to Land Rights

Goldie (1985) identifies three primary kinds of rights relationships that one can have withland: title, use, and usufruct.1 Title refers to recognized ownership, usually through formalregistration with a governmental body, including the (sometimes limited) right toimprove the land or transfer ownership to another party. Use and usufruct overlap butare distinct: usufruct rights involve both specific uses of the land (i.e. gardening) and its‘fruits’ (i.e. a bucket of raspberries), but only if taking the fruits causes no permanentchange or damage to the land. In contrast, simpler use rights do not permit the taking ofthe products of the land: a person might have use rights to live in a house on a piece ofproperty, for example, but not to sell the flowers from the garden. Different uses canoverlap in the same space: not only can various plants and shade-trees be coplanted(Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997), but the same land can be used for recreation, through-transit, etc. These rights often conflict in real-world cases, and must be negotiated. Forexample, constructing a ditch to make marginal land gardenable might not be understoodas damage (or permanent), but the change to the property could permanently reduce thecapacity of the land to sequester carbon, or make development of new buildings moreexpensive. What qualifies as ‘damage’ or reduction of a titleholder’s value is in partdependent on what future uses of the land are imagined (Goldie 1985).

In the USA, these dimensions of tenure are generally conceptually collapsed into the‘bundle of rights’ associated with title to property (Lehavi 2008, 2001). While the wordtenure is widely used in the US urban context, it almost always refers either to residentialstatus as an owner or renter, measured in months or years of occupancy (see Blomley2005a; Davidson 2008; Martin 2005; Niedt 2006; Ostendorf et al. 2001; Purcell 2001;Putnam 2007; Zukin 1987). Ownership and leasehold together form a virtually completeinventory of tenure options; one is the absolute convergence of title, use, and usufruct,while the other is a straightforward formal transfer (for a time) of nearly all property rights.

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Ownership is typically exercised (after Blackstone 2001 [1765]; see Schorr 2009)through the owner’s power to exclude use (Bell and Parchomovsky 2007; Ellickson 1993).When the use of land is governed through simple ownership, all legally allowable deci-sions about who may use the land to what end are left to the owner’s discretion. Belland Parchomovsky (2007, 6) discuss strategies used to maintain this legal constructioneven when it is empirically awkward, including the creation of fictional owners (e.g. cor-porations) and artificially segmented land assets (i.e. shares in condominiums). A largebody of legal theory contorts real-world experiences to conform to theories of freeholdproperty (Lehavi 2008).

In response to this history, some scholars have complicated the idea of property (Blomley2004; DeFilippis 2004; Ellickson 2006; Lehavi 2008, 2009; Weibe and Meinzen-Dick1998). Blomley’s (2004) ‘unsettling’ of assumptions about property norms in the USA isparticularly pertinent: he explores many ways that the ideal of private property, and itssupposedly binary relationship to public property, inadequately describes the experienceand use of property as expressed in cities. Highlighting the claims of squatters, residents ofgentrifying neighborhoods, surfers, and indigenous residents, he makes the argument thattheir very different kinds of claims on space unsettle assumptions about property whichunderlie development rhetoric (Blomley 2004, xvi).

Blomley (2004, 4) notes the political power that is regularly invested in the repli-cation of private property as the dominant form of property, and also in reinforcingthe ‘private power’ that individuals have over their property. Harvey (2004) similarlyargues (in a different context) that although the rights to private property and todemand rents from that property are primate in the American legal system, theconstant ideological reinforcement of that primacy should be read as a signal of itscontingency rather than its natural status. This contingency reinforces Blomley’s pointthat the contemporary property rights regime is neither inevitable nor neutral. Power-ful interests are deeply invested in the ongoing reinforcement of property (see Brennerand Theodore 2002).

Of course, there are already some legal structures that moderate the absolute propertyrights that ownership might otherwise offer in the US context. Zoning and buildingcodes impede the ‘sole and despotic dominion’ (Blackstone 2001 [1765], 3) of owners byconstraining what types of people and activities those owners may allow or exclude, andwhat improvements they may make to their land (Bell and Parchomovsky 2007). Evenmore pertinent are easements: legal contracts establishing particular use rights in another’sproperty, such as access to a beach or crossing a parcel to access another without publicroad frontage. Easements are a conventional legal mechanism through which multiplenon-ownership use privileges might be managed; yet Lehavi (2004, 12) notes that ‘a sys-tem of private easements is cost effective only when the negotiations and coordinationinvolve a relatively small number of persons’. If easements must be multilaterally negoti-ated among a large community or the public, the capacity of property owners and usersto manage their many complex contractual obligations would be rapidly overwhelmed(Lehavi 2004). Easements, like zoning regulations, building codes, and other related formsof constraint, do modify the absolute power that is theoretically associated with owner-ship of land by transferring a portion of the bundle of rights from the owner to the stateor a third party. However, they are fragile tools for understanding or regulating complex,overlapping non-property rights in land among many members of a community or citi-zens of a city. Still, their existence (despite this fragility) helps illustrate that despite theongoing ideological reinforcement that Harvey (2004) highlights, property rights are notabsolute.

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Similarly, DeFilippis’ (2004) exploration of collective property in the USA illustratesthat property rights need not be held individually. He notes the existence of several typesof collective housing ownership (limited equity cooperatives, community land trusts, andmutual housing associations), describing their respective models of ownership and gover-nance.2 DeFilippis (2004, 111) is strongly critical of the disempowering tendencies incontemporary capitalist formulations of housing ownership, but he is somewhat skepticalof the capacity of collectives to realize autonomy from such formulations; he writes thattheir ‘abilities to control the larger flows of capital in their local real-estate market, ortheir political potential to transform the meaning of housing and property, have been …limited’. Forms of collective ownership may have shown limited power to ‘change thegame’, but they remain instructive instances of the non-universality of the instinct to pri-vate ownership, and of the negotiability of rights regimes.

Even legal scholars who seek to justify private property sometimes find themselvesexploring the limits of its descriptive utility. Ellickson’s (1993) defense of private prop-erty, for example, is widely cited; he argues that the virtue of private property is that, inmany instances, it encourages responsible use of land (i.e. farming which does notdegrade the soil, or maintenance of a family home). However, in a later analysis, heexplores the limits of the classical property model within the household, noting that itwould be non-sensical to liberally divide all domestic spaces into private domains andnegotiate disputes through legal mechanisms Ellickson (2006, 313). While Ellickson wantsto carve out a special dispensation for the household, elsewhere he notes that disputesamong adjacent landholders are often resolved extra-legally (Ellickson 1994). Despite theevident theoretical utility of liberal property law in defining ground rules, many (and pos-sibly most) use conflicts appear to be decided through social, not legal, negotiation.

Although the rights to use land and exclude users are included in the bundle of rightsin property under US law, conventional property performs its function best as a pleasantfiction from which virtually all owners and users of land diverge daily at multiple scalesand with vastly varying effects. As Blomley (2004, 152) notes, a liberal theorization ofproperty ownership struggles to accommodate the patterns of use that we see even inhighly liberal or neoliberal environments. His provocation is toward a more complexnotion of property, and he cites Marx in arguing that

Property … is not reducible to private property. The city is crosscut by claims to land that areneither private nor statist. Lacking formal rights status, these claims nevertheless are defended,articulated, and mobilized ….Moreover, the ‘right to exclude’ has, as its necessary concomitant,the ‘right not to be excluded’. Blomley (2004, 153)

While I agree with Blomley’s argument that the city is crosscut by these claims, and Iunderstand his desire to reclaim the discourse around property from neoliberal ideologues,I argue here that there is already an expansive vocabulary and extensive literature to beleveraged in thinking about these claims, namely, that of tenure. Land tenure is preciselythe ‘right not to be excluded’ from certain uses in certain contexts regardless of title;whether enforced socially or through formal power, tenure rights permit certain uses in adurable way. When the residents of one block are permitted to use each others’ stoops,but the same action on another block provokes a call to the police; when unhoused resi-dents are systematically permitted to live and loiter under certain bridges but not underothers; when communities turn abandoned lots into urban farms: in these cases and otherslike them, the use (and benefits from the use) of urban land are governed by systems ofrights which are not derived from title yet have enormous impact on the lives of urbanresidents.



In a related vein, scholars drawing on Lefebvre’s concept of ‘the right to the city’ haveattempted to argue normatively against the claim that property rights are an appropriateset of tools for regulating urban use; they see the status quo preeminence of propertyrights as systematically unjust (Mitchell 2003; Purcell 2002, 2003). Purcell (2003, 583)argues, for example, that ‘Lefebvre conceives of a politics in which inhabitants (instead ofcapital and the state) take a central role in the decisions that produce the space wherethey live’. He articulates Lefebvre’s call for a right to use the spaces of the city – to‘appropriate’ them – that is justified by the condition of existing in and inhabiting thatcity.

This call for rights rooted in inhabitance is clearly compatible with a tenure lens. How-ever, the right to the city is one particular configuration of possible non-property rightsin urban spaces, not the only possible configuration – nor does it describe today’s ‘actu-ally existing’ landscape of non-property urban rights (Marcuse 2010; Purcell 2002). ‘Theright to the city’ as it is most often articulated is focused more on motivating an alter-native politics than understanding the specific regimes of particular, sedimented, sociallyconstructed rights which have emerged from contemporary negotiation. Indeed, Purcell(2002, 105) notes that

in order to define the geography of the political community that is bound together by the rightto the city, and in order to define who is entitled to its rights and who is not, the urban scalewill have to be defined through a process of struggle. Lefebvre is of little help here.

Describing the geography of non-property rights in all of its specificity, with fullacknowledgement of how it is shaped by social and political processes, is exactly what thevocabulary of land tenure facilitates.3

Tenure from a Southern Perspective

The literature on tenure in developing contexts, while diverse, tends to address three pri-mary dimensions of tenure: durability, liberal market compatibility, and social equity.Durability refers to the capacity of those who have acquired tenure in land to maintain itover a period of time, even if social or economic conditions evolve (Appell 1997). Liberalmarket compatibility refers to the ability of those who have tenure to participate in eco-nomic markets, be it for the fruits of the land or their rights in the land itself (Feder andFeeny 1991). Social equity refers to the experience of justice or fairness in the distri-bution of rights in land; many scholars have raised questions as to the fairness of situationswhere class- or kinship-based factors govern permission to use land (Lastarria-Cornhieland Melmed-Sanjak 1999), or the impact of tenure regime modifications on genderequity (Rocheleau and Edmunds 1997).

Liberalism refers to a context for social and economic action with constrained stateactors and principled deference to the individual (rational) actor in decision-making(Lehavi 2009). McCarthy (2006, 87) identifies three ‘pillars of faith’ in liberal orthodoxy:that self-regulating markets produce optimal outcomes, that state intervention is usuallycounterproductive, and that a depoliticized civil society can best address any (temporary)failures of lightly regulated markets. These assumptions promote moving decision-makinginto markets which are minimally fettered by state regulation or social constraints ondecision-making. What distinguishes ‘traditional’ tenure from liberalized tenure and own-ership is the insulation of use and usufruct rights from markets, and thus from straight-forward valuation and transfer (Dale 1997). Tenure rights can be justified by both legaland social authority, but when the value of those rights cannot be valued and acquired in



an open marketplace, conventional liberal analyses find them objectionable (Belay andManig 2004; Feder and Feeny 1991).

The specificities of ‘traditional’ tenure models vary enormously. Of particular relevancein this analysis, however, are tenure regimes in which a variety of uses are managed onland in which many parties have durable rights that are recognized by their communities.In some instances, land is owned by the state while use rights of various kinds remainwith tenant-farmers (Belay and Manig 2004; Crewett and Korf 2008). In others, formalownership is invested in community governance institutions at various scales, who distrib-ute use rights (and sometimes the profits from use, e.g. the proceeds of agricultural prod-ucts) formally or informally (Barnes 2009). In most cases, the land in question is rural andagricultural. Extending the analysis of the power dynamics of tenure into the domesticsphere, feminist geographers in particular have made a point of exploding assumptionsabout ‘household tenure’. Even within households there are varying obligations to work,rights to use land, and rights to the fruits of labor on the land (Carr 2008; Doss 2001).

Traditional tenure regimes vary across different conceptual axes, but I emphasize twoin particular: formality and differentiation. Formality is the degree to which the rules gov-erning how one establishes and maintains the right to use or benefit from land are codi-fied, consistent, and compatible with overarching legal frameworks. This notion offormality is not entirely congruent with the concept of liberal market compatibility asoutlined above: that tenure rights are formally codified or acknowledged by the state doesnot mean that they are compatible with a liberal market (though the converse, that infor-mal tenure is necessarily illiberal, is more true). Tenure regulation in the Mexican ejidocontext, for example, is quite ‘formal’, both in the sense that the process is legally sanc-tioned and that ejido communities ratify their tenure decisions through regular public pro-ceedings (Barnes 2009; Perramond 2001). Ejido use rights regimes, however, remainilliberal, e.g. largely inaccessible to external capital investment.

Similarly, tenure regimes have varying degrees of differentiation – that is, varying num-bers and distinctions between the types of use and usufruct rights pertaining to a particu-lar piece of land. In the Ethiopian case described by Crewett and Korf (2008), forexample, the state owns all land, but use rights are invested in individual farmers; thatfarmer inherits all of the rights except those related to title to the land. However, highlydifferentiated rights are common in traditional tenure contexts. Carr (2008), for exampledescribes the ways in which women are expected to work on the household farmbroadly, and also on a subsection intended for subsistence specifically. While the labor isquite similar, decisions about what is planted and the sale of the crop are strongly divided.Rocheleau and Edmunds (1997) note that under traditional tenure models, rights andobligations can be complex and nested, as when household men hold the economic rightsto land, but particular crops or parts of crops may be reserved for female or householduse.

The Social Construction of American Urban Land Tenure

Even a brief reading of the southern tenure literature – particularly regarding the dimen-sions of formality and differentiation of use and usufruct rights – provokes comparisonwith US urban contexts. Urban density creates opportunistic network effects that pro-mote economic development and rich cultural expression, but that density also createstensions over uses of public and private spaces (Cox and Mair 1988; Gertler 2004). Thesetensions inevitably lead to a certain amount of negotiation and conflict (Blomley 2007;Leitner et al. 2008). While some scholars have argued that illiberal tenure arrangements



foster problematic (and economically inefficient) incentives for non-optimal uses (Ellick-son 2006), in urban settings, these informal and illiberal tenure arrangements abound.Through social negotiation, consensus can develop among a community that certain uses(and users) of space are acceptable, and will be accepted in an ongoing way, while otheruses and users will not (Leitner et al. 2008; Martin 2003a).

I suggest that this is because in densely populated settings that are heavily used by dif-ferentially transient populations, some degree of informal tenure is (contrary to orthodoxassumptions) necessary rather than parasitic. In order for cities to function at high densi-ties, citizens must be able to make complexly overlapping but non-interfering use ofspace. As noted above, the conventional articulation of property ownership is largelyfocused on excluding non-permitted users and uses, preserving land for the use of one orfew designees. However, this model of rights management does not reflect how the usesof many urban spaces are regulated in practice: multiple citizens can and do make over-lapping claims on the use of space, especially when the liberally designated owner isabsent, disinterested, or obscure.

Both public and private property share this tension between formal and informal nego-tiation of use rights. The right to use particular spaces is certainly constrained by the priv-ileged legal status of ownership: Low (2006) and Blackmar (2006), for example, eachlament the ways in which private ownership of would-be public spaces diminish theirsocial and political potential, complaints that I would argue speak to the limited legal andsocial purchase for use rights in those spaces. Use of ‘private-public’ spaces like malls andplazas, or even technically public spaces like libraries or parks, is often intensely regulatedand contingent on normative expectations of docile, consumer-oriented subjecthood (seeBlackmar 2006; Davis 1992; Low et al. 2005). Amin (2008) explores the social regulationof the use of public spaces for specific types of recreation by invoking a notion of ‘collec-tive culture’; Blomley (2005b), while certainly acknowledging the formal legal constrainton private use of public land, notes that cultural norms play a crucial role in regulatingthe use of that space in (for example) public gardening. These are appropriations of thecommons, certainly, but not in a tragic sense [after Hardin (1968)]. As urban residentsinteract and negotiate, durable consensus can emerge about who may use which spaces towhat ends.

Different kinds of tenure rights – including rights associated with title to land, but alsoincluding many kinds of use or usufruct – already exist in US cities, even when they gouncommented. Complicating notions of property is important, but without articulatingthe other rights in land that stand alongside varied modes of ownership, scholars riskreifying the status of the category they intend to complicate. For example, Blomley’s(2005b) research on gardening at the boundary between public and private land certainlyreveals complexly varied notions of ownership among his respondents which shape theirviews on appropriate use. But it also points toward how different communities of userswith varying ethnic identities and economic status see different kinds of use as differen-tially acceptable. Some of his respondents reported that any individual action to remakepublic land is not acceptable, while others objected to specific kinds of uses that theythemselves, or an imagined community, find unesthetic or in conflict with more valueduses (foot traffic, open access, recreation, etc.) These are the kinds of differences that ten-ure vocabularies describe, enabling productive comparison between urban contexts. Whatkinds of use are acceptable in different neighborhoods or communities? How durable isthe permission to engage in such uses? If you grow flowers who may pick them? Whomay sell them? And – critically – what are the penalties for transgression? Is formal powerenrolled, or is enforcement a matter of shunning (or vigilantism)? A focus on tenure



emphasizes that non-property land rights are not arbitrary – and that different uses will beaccepted on the same land by different communities.

While situated in a Latin American context, Irazabal (2009) also makes a related pointin attempting to apply a right to the city critique locally. Scholars focused on the right tothe city have been more focused on delegitimizing property rights (and asserting a parti-cular alternative regime for legitimizing use) than on describing the complex assemblageof rights already present in existing US cities. Irazabal notes that in order to visualizewhat a right to the city in complex urban contexts might mean, scholars and activistsneed to consider that the poorest urban residents typically have a messy assemblage ofinformal rights; a critique of the role of property, she argues, should include considerationof the many different, overlapping, specific modes of dispossession caused by formalizingtenure and reinforcing property rights.

Conclusion: Toward a Tenure-Aware Research Agenda

I suggest that there are three primary explanations for why tenure-oriented analyses havenot been widely used in US urban scholarship. First, the bulk of the literature on tenurein the southern context is oriented toward the project of liberalizing tenure regimes, andthe USA is (at least from a formal perspective) quite nearly as liberal a property market ascurrently exists. It has thus been easy to assume that tenure is not terribly relevant tonorthern contexts, despite the unambiguous presence of complex regimes of formal andinformal use rights overlain upon conventional property rights. Second, the tenure litera-ture’s focus on rural contexts has required urbanists to engage with a body of scholarshipthat has not offered much in the way of empirical ground for common cause. There is aliterature on urban tenure in the global south, though it is small compared to that onrural ⁄ agricultural tenure (Durand-Lasserve and Royston 2002b); however, even theseanalyses of southern urban tenure regimes are less about how they are socially constitutedand instead generally focused on how tenure can be secured and (often) formalized (Kru-ekeberg and Paulsen 2002). While credible, such approaches have not helped urbanscholars in northern contexts explain how rights in property are formed alongside a thor-oughly ‘regular’ property regime. Third, and more subtly, theories of tenure are typicallyapplied in rural contexts not just because the developing world is less urbanized than theUSA, but also because tenure-oriented scholars have often taken a fairly conventionaleconomic perspective on what constitute the ‘fruits of the land’. In contemporary urbancontexts, very little is ‘produced’ from real property; no animals graze and no crop isyielded [the tantalizing promise of small-scale urban farming notwithstanding (Doron2005)]. However, the use of urban spaces does yield real value to those users, both eco-nomically (through the transactions enabled because of proximity) and inherent in thevalue of the use itself (Logan and Molotch 1987; Storper and Venables 2004). Becausethe value of urban land is largely locational rather than inherent, our understanding ofthe ‘fruits’ of urban land must be critically engaged and enlarged.

While regimes of tenure are operative in US cities, the particularities of how they oper-ate and how they are constructed remain unclear. While American urban geographerscan and should draw on urban tenure analyses in the global south, urban morphology inthe USA is distinct from southern cities: we should begin to examine urban usufruct withan exploratory disposition. A tenure-aware urban research agenda should build on previ-ous theoretical inquiry addressing the social construction of urban norms and institutions.

I suggest that urban geographers leverage our existing intellectual investment byexploring an ‘urban land tenure’ composed of tenure rights in spaces and places. Beyond



the obvious multiple simultaneous uses of ‘land’ in multi-story, multiple use buildings thatconfound cartesian description, urban geographers have convincingly argued that thespaces and places which residents experience are more than simply a cartesian platting ofland, but are constructed in the interaction between physical spaces and social relations(Cidell 2006; Fraser et al. 2003; Marston 2000; Martin 2003a,b). Discussing use and usu-fruct rights in space or place rather than land enlarges and enriches the notion of tenureand orients it toward urban problems. However, a theorization of tenure in spaces andplaces should not lose the concrete, present, and located properties that can give thediscussion of land tenure in southern contexts such urgency. A project to understand andhighlight urban land tenure is important not because it links nicely with existing urbantheory (though, conveniently, it seems to do so); it is important because the social andpolitical rights which urban citizens negotiate in their places and spaces are currently ren-dered secondary or invisible by existing discourses about property rights – often, eventhose critical of property. The project of bringing an understanding of socially negotiatedtenure arrangements from the southern literature to bear on the American urban contextis not simply a theoretical exploration: the many rights of residents to use land in UScities are powerful assets for residents, and if they are not cataloged and understood, theirimpact will continue to be systematically undervalued.

Short Biography

The author is a PhD candidate at Clark University. His current research involves threemain areas. First, he explores the social regulation of urban spaces and places, with aninterest in the interaction between legal and non-legal modes of regulation. Second, he isinterested the practices that make up sustainable urbanism, focusing on political and socialprocesses that make cities more or less sustainable. Last, he is exploring the spatial politicsof group home siting.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Joseph Pierce, Clark University, Graduate School of Geography, 950 Main Street,Worcester, MA 01610, USA. E-mail: [email protected].

1 Some economic accounts articulate these in an essentially parallel way as the right to exchange property, to useproperty, and to make use of the services of the property (Demsetz, 1967).2 These can be read as the more conventional versions of collective ownership; there have been more radicalcommunally owned residential environments both in the USA and elsewhere in liberalized property contexts (seeDeFilippis 2004, 38–40; Lehavi 2009, 11).3 I more fully explore the implications of this line of thought for scholarship in the Right to the City literature ina parallel publication.

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Further Readings

Adams, M., Cousins, B. and Manona, S. (1999). Land tenure and economic development in rural South Africa: constraintsand opportunities. London, UK: Overseas Development Institute, Working Paper 125.

Besley, T. and Burgess, R. (2000). Land reform, poverty reduction, and growth: evidence from India. The QuarterlyJournal of Economics 115, pp. 389–430.

DeFilippis, J. (1999). Alternatives to the ‘new urban politics’: finding locality and autonomy in local economicdevelopment. Political Geography 18, pp. 973–990.

De Janvry, A., Sadoulet, E. and Wolford, W. (2001). The changing role of the state in Latin American landreforms. In: De Janvry, A., Gordillo, G. Platteau, J. and Sadoutlet, E. (eds) Access to land, rural poverty, and publicaction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 279–304.

Duneier, M. (1999). Sidewalk. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Elwood, S. (2002). Neighborhood revitalization through ‘collaboration’: assessing the implications of neoliberal

urban policy at the grassroots. GeoJournal 58, pp. 121–130.Massey, D. (2005). For space. London, UK: Sage Publications.Payne, G. and Fernandes, E. (2001). Legality and legitimacy in urban tenure issues. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute

of Land Policy, Working Paper.United Nations Development Programme (2003). Millennium development goals: a compact among nations to end human

poverty. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Wily, L. (2001). Reconstructing the African commons. Africa Today 48, pp. 77–99.



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