Metropolitics

On the Land Question in India: The Case of Sriperumbudur Industrial Region in Peri-Urban Chennai

V. Gajendran — 2025-12-23T06:00:00Z

Amidst intense demand for land, farmers near Chennai, India face dispossession by neglect.
---- Series: Provincializing the “Real-Estate Turn” My essay begins with a puzzle. The past two decades have been called the decades of intense land conflicts in India. There has been an outpouring of media and academic scholarship on agrarian landowners resisting and protesting the acquisition of their land for urban and infrastructure projects. In this context of land dispossession and opposition to

- Essays / India, Global South, land, land use, agriculture, farming, real estate, real-estate turn, periurban, Chennai

Massive Evictions and Housing Crisis in Chile

Santiago Castillo Braithwaite — 2025-04-15T05:00:00Z

In the midst of a deep housing crisis, more than 100,000 families in Chile are currently living in informal settlements. Santiago Castillo examines the rise of land occupations following a 2019 social uprising and the recent state responses that, far from providing solutions, have only deepened the conflict.
---- Series: Horizons in the Housing Struggle Starting in October 2019, amid the most intense protests since the end of Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, a wave of urban land occupations

- From the Field / Latin America, South America, Global South, housing, housing crisis, evictions, land, Chile

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

Can the Commons Pave the Way to Greater Land Security?

Irène Salenson & Claire Simonneau & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-22T05:00:00Z

Experiences of collective forms of ownership, based on the concept of the commons, have flourished throughout the world. Irène Salenson and Claire Simonneau ask what opportunities they offer for reducing the precarity of the most disadvantaged city dwellers in the Global South.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income Neighbourhoods A large proportion of urbanites in the Global South live in informal neighbourhoods – around a

- Debates / property, land, Africa, Global South, community land trusts, Latin America, land tenure, land rights, property ownership, land use, land insecurity, land regularization, commons, land commons, urban land commons

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

Jean-François Valette & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-06-08T05:00:00Z

Mexico City's working-class neighbourhoods are the focus of numerous land-regularization operations. Jean-François Valette analyses the impact of these policies and the effects of land titling on already highly fragmented peripheral spaces.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income Neighbourhoods Despite the explosion in the construction of legal “social” housing since the 1990s, the “classic” Mexican model of residential

- From the Field / inequalities, periurban, land, Global South, Latin America, Mexico, land tenure, land rights, land titles, land titling, Mexico City, title deeds, land regularization

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

Land Rights in the Urban Global South

Armelle Choplin & Éric Denis (†) & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-05-18T05:00:00Z

In choosing to focus on the Global South, Metropolitics turns its attention to a key aspect of contemporary cities: land and land rights. By shedding light on situations in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Arab world, this series analyses land-rights strategies deployed by residents of low-income neighbourhoods to access land, and the way these populations benefit – or not – from land reform and from land-titling policies.
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- Series / land, Global South, land tenure, land rights, land titles, land titling, land use

Urban Desires and Lust for Land

Éric Denis (†) & translated by Oliver Waine — 2018-04-20T05:00:00Z

In the Global South, vast swathes of periurban and agricultural land are being sold off and converted into financial windfalls. Éric Denis shows that the working classes also play a role in this commodification of land, giving rise to new means of producing the city. Moreover, this lust for land reveals these populations' desire to see the city expand and reach their doorstep.
---- Series: Land Rights in the Urban Global South. Regularization and Land-Ownership Policies in Low-Income

- From the Field / urban planning, urbanization, urban sprawl, periurban, land, agriculture, farming, Global South, working classes, India, land rights, land titles, land titling, production of the city, land use, commodification

Where Does Public Land Come From? Municipalization and Privatization Debates

Oksana Mironova & Samuel Stein — 2018-03-06T06:00:00Z

This article illuminates contemporary land-use and disposition struggles in New York City by tracing the history of land's passage between the private and public realms. The authors contend that government and community-controlled nonprofit organizations should govern the disposition of the city's remaining public land supply, deliberately deploying this scarce resource to promote the well-being of the people and neighborhoods most at risk in a speculation-fueled real-estate environment.
For

- Debates / land, New York, privatization, community land trusts, tax-lien sales, public land, municipalization, land use

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