Can property be justified in an entangled world?

ABSTRACT

As a liberal institution, private property is based upon a view of the natural order that prioritizes the individual human being over our social existence and over our nonhuman others. Colonial expansion was enabled in part by the misrecognition and denigration of indigenous land management practices. Forms of property were imposed that were incommensurable with the sustainable relationships formed by original owners with land. Given the ubiquity of the Anglosphere’s degraded and abstract understanding of property, is it possible to imagine the decolonization of property? Can property be rethought to close the divide between person and thing, and to better acknowledge the normative values of mutuality and care between people and place? What resources are there within mainstream property theory that might allow for such a reconstruction of property?     

臧村“关系地权”的实践逻辑——一个地权研究分析框架的构建

本文以周雪光的"关系产权"为学术起点,基于产权研究的社会视角提出了"关系地权"的分析性概念,明确了其原则、层次和类型,尝试构建一个地权研究的分析框架,用以观察和分析当下中国乡村的地权制度与乡村社会结构的新变化,并用臧村的几个典型农地纠纷案例予以经验支持。研究发现,在以臧村为代表的村落中,"关系地权"的强力原则在地权配置实践中占据强势地位。在市场化、城市化日渐深入乡村共同体的背景下,一个围绕农地牟取私利的"谋地型乡村精英"逐渐形成。作为新时期乡村社会结构的实体要素之一,该群体的行为对当代中国以"家庭承包责任制"为主体、以"均等原则"为特征的地权分配方式起着严重的扭曲和变形作用。     

Ownership and Control of Farmland: Landlord-Tenant Relations in Wisconsin1

This paper addresses the ownership and control of farmland, presents a conceptual model of landed property, and uses it to examine landlord-tenant relations in Wisconsin. A profile of farmland owners is constructed using survey data from two agricultural counties. Particular attention is paid to who controls farm management decisions on rented land. Results suggest that tenants enjoy much latitude in managing rented land and that relations between landlords and tenants seem satisfactory to both parties.     

A Place to Call Home: Cultural Understandings of Heir Property among Rural African Americans*

Abstract Heir property is land held communally by family members of a landowner who has died intestate. Because this informal arrangement does not fit neatly into the individualist‐centered, integrated property rights system of the United States, it is viewed by most as a hindrance to economic development and capitalism. We present an alternative framework for analyzing the significance of heir property in the African American community and its constraints. While the consequences of owning land with clouded title are clear‐ineligibility for housing programs, inability to secure a mortgage or sell timber, and vulnerability to land loss through partition and tax sales‐we argue that a culturally‐based understanding of heir property provides insight to why it persists among rural African Americans. Based on personal interviews with heir property owners, lawyers, housing counselors, and county officials, the authors illustrate how heir property is supportive of certain cultural values and meets the needs of a subset of rural populations in ways that other forms of property ownership cannot.     

小产权房治理的缘由、途径与政策——以广州市为例

小产权房是在我国特定土地等制度背景下,伴随着城市化出现的社会问题。发生的制度根源在于国家有关制度供给不足,长期不承认集体土地拥有的土地发展权,不允许农民参与土地收益分配,加之房价高企和逐利行为,使问题日益严重。治理的前提是建立合理的房地产税制,将其纳入房产税和土地增值税范围,同时要通过补交税费的方式,分类型引导小产权房合法化。只有承认集体土地的发展权,调整国家相关制度和政策,才能从根本上治理小产权房。     

Regulating Land Development: Local Market Structures and Structured Markets

Current rounds of economic restructuring together with the changing priorities accorded to agricultural production are leading to significant shifts in rural property and tenure relations. This paper analyzes these processes with reference to rural Britain; it reports on empirical evidence collected in the county of Buckinghamshire in southeast England. Two significant types of new rural land development are considered—small-scale industrial units arising out of the conversion of agricultural buildings and golf course developments and their ancillary leisure-based activities. Post-war productionist forms of regulation and particularly established types of agricultural tenure are now being modified by farmers and nonagricultural interests committed to the development of rural land. New demands and market structures are requiring more diversity and flexibility by which land is owned, occupied, and used. These emergent, more flexible macro tenures are based on new sets of social and political alliances between farmers, developers, and local planning systems. Agricultural land is increasingly being viewed as a capital rather than as a productive asset associated with more volatile and regionally defined markets whose regulation is formative.     

Ownership: An Overview1

This paper focuses on the interaction between public and private land ownership as a backdrop to future tenure research. It challenges various myths about land ownership in both sectors and emphasizes the problems in expanding tenure terms of reference to include the socalled “new property.” It concludes with an examination of macro-sociological forces influencing the changing distribution of public and private ownership in the United States.     

Economic and cultural production as structural paradox: the case of international fashion magazine publishing

This paper examines four international fashion magazines – Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire and Vogue – published in five countries around the world. Based on content analysis, publishers’ marketing data, and interviews with editorial and publishing staff, the paper argues that the field of magazine production is structured by a double- or multiple-audience property which leads to structural homology in the fields of media production generally. Precisely because fashion magazines are simultaneously commodities and cultural productions, in which the not-entirely-separate interests of advertisers, the fashion world and readers come into play, all kinds of contradictions emerge to affect their contents. Focusing on international edition launches and magazines markets, the paper also engages with the meaning of journalistic independence and gives its own Gallic twist to globalisation theory.     

The Land Question: Are There Answers?1

“The land question” as posed by Henry George a century ago was answered with a call for land reform, a change in the ownership and control of land. In present-day, market-oriented America the land question is answered with widely available land information for market and policy decisions. Information generated by the Agricultural Economics and Land Ownership Survey (AELOS) of the Census of Agriculture is a footing for analyzing land ownership, land transfers, property taxes, and other issues of land policy. In this paper the issues of ownership distribution and the distributive effects of taxation are defined with AELOS data. The AELOS shows that the distribution of land ownership is concentrated and shows that large landowners pay real property tax rates at less than half the rate of small landowners. Changes in land ownership, transfer, and taxation argue for repeating the AELOS in 1998. A case is presented for replacing the Census of Agriculture with a Census of Land in 2003.     

Institutions and the adoption of rights: political and property rights in Colombia

Citizenship rights are the result of specific political bargains between different collective actors and state authorities (Tilly Theory and Society 26(34):599–602, 1997). The political bargains for rights are encoded in institutions, and these institutions develop independently from each other and take organizational characteristics that make certain rights easier to adopt than others. I argue that these institutions vary along two dimensions that affect the extent to which states can adopt rights successfully: one dimension is distributional and the second is the depth or extension of the rules that frame a given right. This article focuses on the institutional differences between property rights, especially land property, and political rights, and on the consequences of those differences on their adoption. I then illustrate my argument with examples from Colombia since 1980.     

Capital and Mining Property Relations: Reconsidering Marxist Understanding of Feudal Mining Land

Marxism holds that feudal mining land was characterized by production relations that gave lords the upper hand. Lacking productive capital, mining land was generally a site of coercive feudal-property relations. The idea is indefensible, as evidence shows that mining lands triggered property arrangements antagonizing lordly power. This article discusses the labor and capital relations that transformed feudal land into mining land. It argues that this transformation challenged the supremacy of feudal lords by triggering property relations relatively unconstrained by feudal lordly power. The article concludes that mining lands were sites of antagonistic relations, were capital confronted feudal landed property, aiming at isolating lords from the gains of mines.     

新型城镇化与土地制度改革

土地制度改革的核心就是要改计划配置为市场配置。首先,要建立城乡统一、开放、竞争有序的土地市场,为此须转变政府职能,划清政府与市场的界线;改革产权制度,把公有公用的土地公有制改成公有私用的土地公有制;建立城乡统一的土地市场,开放集体土地入市;改革征地制度。其次,要建立适应市场配置的国家宏观调控体系。政府主要有4种调控手段:确立以公众参与式的规划制订办法;正确实施土地用途分区,限制土地使用权,以提高土地利用效率;建立能促进节约用地、优化配置、公平分配土地收益的财税制度,使税收、投资、补贴成为国家调控土地的主要手段;改革行政审批制度,简政放权。     

Bird and mammal use of vernal pools along an urban development gradient

Vernal pools in the northeastern US are of conservation concern primarily because of their role as habitat for specialized pool-breeding amphibians, but their use by birds and mammals may also be of interest, especially from the perspective of the impact of urbanization. We describe camera-trapped wildlife (CTW) at 38 vernal pools along an urban development gradient in greater Bangor, Maine, USA. We detected 20 mammal and 39 bird taxa (29 contacted pool water; 39 detected at >1 site). Land cover type within 1000 m (%), within-pool vegetation (%), and amphibian egg mass numbers explained a substantial portion of the variance (40.8%) in CTW assemblage composition. Submerged vegetation within pools and cover by water and impervious surfaces within 1000 m of pools were key site characteristics defining assemblages. We scored the urban-affiliation of taxa and modeled the relationship between weighted assemblage scores for each site and impervious cover. Impervious cover within 1000 m of pools was positively (p?<?0.01) related to site urban-affiliation scores. Use probability for red fox increased and snowshoe hare decreased with impervious cover at 1000 m. These results indicate that within-pool vegetation and land cover types at 1000 m influenced bird and mammal assemblages that used study pools and greater impervious cover at 100 and 1000 m was correlated with a shift in assemblages from being dominated by urban-avoider to urban-adapted species. We encourage land use planners and managers to consider the influence of land use practices within 1000 m of vernal pools on birds and mammals, especially near amphibian breeding pools.     

Property rights, collective sales and government intervention: averting a tragedy of the anticommons

In response to the need to cater for the requirements of a larger future population, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Singapore released development guide plans, which have provided for higher development intensity to residential land in various parts of the island. One of the impacts is that many property owners in Singapore have banded together to capitalize on the “marriage value” of the en bloc site to reap big windfalls as compared to individual sales. But there were minority owners who objected to the sale. The Land Titles (Strata) (Amendment) Act 1999 was passed on 11 October 1999 to facilitate such en bloc sales as these will release prime land for higher density redevelopment to provide more quality private housing in land-scarce Singapore. This paper shows how property rights and property ownership could have led to a tragedy of the anticommons and how government intervention through legislation has averted such a tragedy. Whilst the Land Titles (Strata) (Amendment) Act 1999 has been successful in facilitating en bloc sales resulting in optimization of scarce land resources, it has raised controversial issues such as majority rule versus minority protection and the attenuation of property rights. The authors conclude that in land-scarce Singapore, public good, in that more land will be made available for private housing for the majority, should take precedence.     

Land Privatization and the Differentiation of the Peasantry: Nicaragua's Coffee Revolution, 1850–1920

Abstract The expansion of coffee cultivation in Nicaragua in the 1870s unleashed a social revolution. Previously most land was common property: by 1920 throughout the coffee districts land was privately owned. Influential historians of Nicaragua see this as the capitalist transition. This essay argues that instead of forging a rural proletariat, this social revolution created a differentiated peasantry whose access to land depended on relations of patronage. Peasant resistance to land privatization and the political, as opposed to economic, nature of the process are examined. The essay concludes that this revolution was more incongruent than congruent with a capitalist social order. The relevance of this history for contemporary political debates in Nicaragua is explored.     

近郊集体所有制土地产权换股权试点方案研究

随着城市化的不断推进,部分农村集体土地被转换为城市建设用地。涉及城市化的农村居民理应分享到土地资源优化配置的财富性收益,同时完成农民到市民的身份转换。上海近郊在城市化过程中对建设用地的需求越来越大,经济发展和保护农民合法权益是必须处理好的一对重要关系。从现有经验看,集体所有制土地产权换股权是合理利用、优化配置郊区集体所有制土地,协调好产业发展与农民权益保障的有效改革路径,也是上海实现包容性城市化发展、消除新二元结构的重要制度创新。     

浦东农村集体建设用地流转研究

当前,浦东集体建设用地低效、闲置和浪费现象比较普遍,资产价值尚未真正体现,尤其是乡镇工业用地聚集度低,布局分散,点多规模小,建筑密度和容积率低;工业产出率不高,厂房、场地闲置严重。通过集体建设用地的流转,实施土地二次开发,可以有效利用存量用地,盘活土地资源。要通过确权登记发证,进一步理清产权界限,避免产权主体虚置与权能重叠;建立合理的收益分配机制,确保农民利益;加快相关财政体制衔接．保障流转工作有序推进。     

LEGISLATING COMMONS: THE NAVAJO TRIBAL COUNCIL AND THE NAVAJO RANGE

The article argues that chronic overgrazing on the Navajo Reservation is the result of policies of the BIA and the Tribal Council. In support of that hypothesis the paper outlines the nature of property rights to grazing land on the Reservation. It shows that BIA and Tribal Council actions have led to the proliferation of small herds since 1933. Small herds increase the resource costs of establishing and enforcing property rights, and they increase the political costs of requiring compliance with grazing rules. Statistical tests reveal a close relationship between herd size and overstocking of the range. The paper concludes that in the absence of the constraints of a private property system, it may be necessary for an outside agency to regulate grazing to avoid the problem of the Commons.     

Sharecropping,Insecure Land Rights and Land Titling Policies: A Case Study of Lac Alaotra,Madagascar

Sharecropping between poor landlords and rich tenants has hitherto been the subject of very little academic scrutiny. Given that such ‘reverse share tenancy’ contracts are mostly at odds with the canonical risk‐sharing explanation for sharecropping, this article discusses a rationale for them that relies on weak property rights as well as the legal doctrine of adverse possession, and tests it using data from Lac Alaotra, Madagascar, where this type of tenancy accounts for one‐third of land rentals. The empirical findings are discussed in relation to recent land‐reform policies by the Government of Madagascar, the World Bank, IFAD, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.     

Planning and development control through lease conditions

The Hong Kong government has pledged to deal with the imbalance between supply and demand of housing. Given the innate constraints of limited land resources in Hong Kong and the extensive and expedient control enforced through lease conditions, the Hong Kong government can alleviate the long-recognized problem of housing shortage by modifying specific development conditions. Therefore, the supply of housing units can be changed at a faster pace to satisfy the requirement of private dwellings. Other factors affecting the property market in Hong Kong include land supply, economic issues, population growth, and income growth. Many studies, for example, Hui et al. (Monograph, Department of Building and Real Estate, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Hong Kong Government (Study of Housing Demand, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong and Study of Housing Demand Model, Hong Kong Government Printer, Hong Kong), have investigated in detail the impacts of these factors on the property market. However, little or nothing is known about the planning and development control through lease conditions. Therefore, this study particularly attempts to examine how the Hong Kong government exerts its influence in the local private residential market through changing the development conditions. These conditions will be studied separately and distinctively in order to capture their unitary effects upon the local private residential real estate market. Section 1 looks at Hong Kong's tenure system, followed by the deliberation of how planning and development control is done through lease conditions (in Section 2). 3 and 4 set out the analytical framework and report on the findings of how lease conditions affect property supply. The concluding section gives out recommendations.