land

Essays

What Is Land?

Sai Balakrishnan & Mattijs van Maasakkers - 1 June 2021
Market-oriented land-use instruments presume that is possible to delink development or pollution rights from a...
Debates

Can the Commons Pave the Way to Greater Land Security?

Irène Salenson & Claire Simonneau & translated by Oliver @Waine - 22 June 2018
Experiences of collective forms of ownership, based on the concept of the commons, have flourished throughout the...
From the Field

Land Regularization on the Fringes of Mexico City: A Recipe for Reducing Inequalities?

Jean-François Valette & translated by Oliver @Waine - 8 June 2018
Mexico City’s working-class neighbourhoods are the focus of numerous land-regularization operations. Jean-François...
From the Field

Land Insecurity in Khartoum: When Land Titles Fail to Protect Against Public Predation

Alice Franck & translated by Oliver @Waine - 6 June 2018
The unstable economic and political context in Sudan has encouraged people to invest massively in land in urban...
Series

Land Rights in the Urban Global South

Armelle Choplin & Éric Denis & translated by Oliver @Waine - 18 May 2018
In choosing to focus on the Global South, Metropolitics turns its attention to a key aspect of contemporary cities:...
From the Field

Urban Desires and Lust for Land

Éric Denis & translated by Oliver @Waine - 20 April 2018
In the Global South, vast swathes of periurban and agricultural land are being sold off and converted into...
Debates

Where Does Public Land Come From? Municipalization and Privatization Debates

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein - 6 March 2018
This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of...
From the Field

Land Titling: A Tool, not a Panacea

Kareem Ibrahim & Deena Khalil - 20 December 2016
The government of Egypt has long relied on land titling to limit the growth of informal urban residential...
From the Field

Securing Land Tenure in Egypt: Who Needs Registered Titles?

David Sims - 14 June 2016
David Sims challenges popular wisdom on property-rights regimes in non-Western nations by questioning the relevance...
Essays

The Wrecker’s Pick. The Rationales and Hidden Agendas of Urban Renewal in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Alain Faure & translated by Christina @Mitrakos - 7 June 2016
Alain Faure, a scholar of the social history of cities, puts urban renewal into perspective. He questions the...
Debates

Interrupting Inequality: Crisis and Opportunity in Low-Income Housing Policy

Susan Saegert - 26 January 2015
Inequality in the United States is deeply rooted in issues of property ownership, wealth, race and class....
Essays

Looking Backward into the Future of New York

Ted Steinberg - 12 January 2015
Can the lesson of Hurricane Sandy dampen the enthusiasm of New York City’s growth machine? Ted Steinberg, author of...
Debates

Why isn’t there enough housing in France?

Jean-Claude Driant & translated by Oliver @Waine - 11 January 2012
The idea that France is experiencing a serious housing deficit, requiring a massive home-building policy is the...

Series

Urban Wastes, Present and Future
New York Dossier: The Food Industry Faces the Covid‑19 Pandemic
Cities in the Age of Financialization
Contemporary Housing Struggles: Crises, Activism, and Critical Research
New York Tech Dossier: The Dark Side of New York’s Tech Economy
Progressive Mayors and Urban Social Movements
Land Rights in the Urban Global South
Climate Change and Social Change
Shrinking Cities

Featured

Debates

Covid-19, War, and Working-Class Neighborhoods

Pierre Gilbert & translated by Oliver @Waine - 5 June 2020
The residents of France’s working-class neighborhoods, accused of exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic through...
Essays

Sentinel Territories: A New Concept for Looking at Environmental Change

David Blanchon & Frédéric Keck & François-Michel Le Tourneau & Stéphane Tonnelat & Adriana Zuniga-Teran - 8 May 2020
In this essay, the authors develop the concept of “sentinel territories,” or environments where humans can perceive...
From the Field

Who Cleans Paris? Garbage Collectors in Their Own Words

Coline Ferrant & Marie Mourad & translated by Oliver @Waine - 21 June 2019
Who are Paris’s garbage collectors? Coline Ferrant and Marie Mourad highlight the diverse working conditions covered...
From the Field

Moving Inside City Limits: The Urban Mobility of Undocumented Youth

Stephen P. Ruszczyk - 4 June 2019
The urban context and public transportation shape how undocumented youths move within cities. In a comparison of...
Interviews

Teaching Art and the History of Tattoos at Rikers Island: An Interview with Tamara...

Lisa Jean Moore - 22 January 2019
An interview with Tamara Santibanez, who teaches art and the cultural and social history of tattoos to youth...
From the Field

Snowbirds’ Gift Economy in the Arizona Desert

David Frati - 7 November 2017
Each year, 200,000 retired people spend the winter in and around the small town of Quartzsite, Arizona, in the...

Other resources online

Cycles of Violence: Analysing Media Discourse in the Newspaper...

Mobile Lives Forum
How are cyclist and pedestrian deaths depicted in newspaper reports, and how do these reports help shape...

Lahti: The First Carbon-Rationing Experiment Applied to Local...

Mobile Lives Forum
The city of Lahti in Finland was the first to experiment with a carbon-trading scheme among its inhabitants to...

Is Rationing Carbon for Travel a Fair, Efficient, and Realistic...

Mobile Lives Forum
In the wake of the pandemic, a carbon tax at Europe’s borders is now on the agenda, but a domestic version for...

Reducing Carbon-Emitting Travel: A Factor of Social Cohesion and...

Mobile Lives Forum
As part of France’s Mission on the Future of the Economic Model of Public Transportation, commissioned by the French...

Strasbourg, An Example of a Cycling City

Mobile Lives Forum
Strasbourg is the leading city for cycling in France and a constant source of inspiration for all French cities...

The Trinity of Walking, Cycling and Public Transportation Must Be...

Mobile Lives Forum
While emissions from the transportation sector remain at a very high level, all hopes are currently pinned on the...
Centre national de recherche scientifique
Journal supported by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales (Institute of Human and Social Sciences) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)

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