Metropolitics

What Is Land?

Sai Balakrishnan & Mattijs van Maasakkers — 2021-06-01T05:00:00Z

Market-oriented land-use instruments presume that is possible to delink development or pollution rights from a particular plot of land, transfer these rights across space, and assemble them at some other location. When the social, ecological, and economic value of land is separated from its location, these processes can produce idiosyncratic planning outcomes, and a priori narrow understandings of land, which run counter to the planning ethic of getting to know a site's identity and of keeping

- Essays / land, land use, land-use planning, property rights, ecosystem services, development rights

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

Alice Franck & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-06T05:00:00Z

The unstable economic and political context in Sudan has encouraged people to invest massively in land in urban areas. In Khartoum, the land rush concerns everyone, from the elite to the working classes – and, above all, the authorities, who maintain a stranglehold over these precious assets. Title deeds are regularly disputed, suggesting that land insecurity is on the increase.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income

- From the Field / property, land, Africa, Global South, insecurity, land tenure, land rights, land titles, property rights, property titles, property tenure, Khartoum, land titling, property ownership, public land, land use, title deeds, land insecurity, Sudan

Making Their Own History: Squatters on Manhattan's Lower East Side

Benjamin H. Shepard — 2017-12-19T06:00:00Z

During the 1970s, when Manhattan's Lower East Side was full of derelict real estate, activists laid claim to left-behind buildings and vacant lots. Over time, the squatters' challenge to conventional forms of property ownership endured, though in greatly modified forms. Benjamin Shepard reviews Amy Starecheski's oral history.
Amy Starecheski's Ours to Lose is a compelling oral history of the squatting movement in the Lower East Side of New York City in the years that it moved from conflict to

- Reviews / squat, New York, right to the city, vacant lots, property rights, squatters, Lower East Side, property ownership, community gardens

Land Titling: A Tool, not a Panacea

Kareem Ibrahim & Deena Khalil — 2016-12-20T06:00:00Z

The government of Egypt has long relied on land titling to limit the growth of informal urban residential settlements. Kareem Ibrahim and Deena Khalil argue that while titling addresses problems stemming from informality in some cases, the benefits of this strategy are exaggerated, particularly given that low-income households are excluded from formal credit markets regardless. In Egypt as elsewhere, titling initiatives fail to address more fundamental issues of poverty and marginalization.

- From the Field / property, land, Africa, Global South, informality, Egypt, North Africa, Cairo, land tenure, land rights, land titles, property rights, property titles, property tenure, land titling, informal housing, access to credit

Securing Land Tenure in Egypt: Who Needs Registered Titles?

David Sims — 2016-06-14T05:00:00Z

David Sims challenges popular wisdom on property-rights regimes in non-Western nations by questioning the relevance of formal property titling for poor urban households in Egypt, where informal and semi-formal solutions provide the majority of households with surprisingly secure forms of possession. In light of this—and in the absence of a strong national state—can something as complex and culturally idiosyncratic as property relations be objectified as a development problem in need of a