This rejoinder engages with the commentaries on my article on ‘Digital experiments with landed property’ from Julien Migozzi and Sara Safransky. In my response, I share my reflections on the valuable ...provocations and interrelated themes offered in these generous commentaries. First, I argue that an especially distinctive aspect of digital experiments with landed property is the volumetric property relations they are generating. Second, I attend to subjectivities cultivated within and against digitised property relations, and how they relate to structures of power. Third, I extend my thinking on the glitchiness and fallibility associated with processes of experimentation.
Despite legislation banning combustible cladding materials after the 2017 Grenfell fire, at least 10,000 buildings were still awaiting remediation in 2022. This is in large part because fragmented ...ownership and management structures alongside the specificities of British property law produced a situation in which individual apartment owners (leaseholders) were liable for the costs of remediation rather than those who own the buildings (freeholders) or the developers who built them. Faced with unaffordable remediation bills, leaseholders became stuck in uninsurable, unsellable, potentially fire‐prone units. Through the case of a London housing block, we trace the relationship between the structure of landed property, value extraction, and the distribution of risk to understand how a significant portion of the UK's housing stock have remained firetraps. We argue that institutionalised value grabbing not only created the conditions of social murder but also became an obstacle to remediation, resulting in a politically charged “asset class struggle” over the way in which the structure of housing property and its capitalisation mediates social harm.
Resumen
A pesar de que la actual legislación prohíbe los materiales de revestimiento combustible desde que se produjo el incendio de Grenfell en 2017, al menos 10.000 edificios esperaban ser reacondicionados en 2022. Esto se debe en gran parte a que la propiedad y estructuras de gestión responsables se encuentran fragmentadas, así como a ciertas especificidades de la ley de propiedad británica. Todo lo cual ha generado una situación en la cual los “propietarios” individuales de apartamentos (tenedores de contratos en leasing) son los responsables de afrontar los costos de la adaptación edilicia, en lugar de que dichos costos sean afrontados por quienes son los efectivos dueños de los edificios (los propietarios) o por los desarrolladores que los construyeron. Ante gastos de reacondicionamiento inasequibles, los tenedores de los contratos de leasing quedaron atrapados en unidades sin seguro, invendibles y potencialmente propensas a incendios. A través del caso de un complejo de viviendas en Londres, analizamos la relación entre la estructura de la propiedad inmobiliaria, la extracción de valor y la distribución del riesgo para entender cómo una parte significativa del stock de viviendas del Reino Unido ha permanecido como verdaderas trampas frente a posibles incendios. Sostenemos que la apropiación del valor institucionalizada no solo creó las condiciones de un asesinato social, sino que también se convirtió en un obstáculo para la readaptación de los edificios, lo que resultó en una “lucha de clases de activos” políticamente cargada en relación a la forma en que la estructura de la propiedad de viviendas y su capitalización median el daño social.
The year 1878 was a challenging moment for the Romanian nation, but at the same time it was a year during which, the authorities went forward with determined deeds on the path of surpassing the ...transition period that Dobrogea was facing, because the ideal of bringing it at the same developing stage as the rest of the country was deeply rooted in Romanians’ conscience. Establishing a relation between history and economy into an integrate vision allowed us to analyse the new status of Dobrogea, which continued to develop overcoming the difficulties that were coming after its union with Romania. Moreover, we succeeded in approaching the society and local and central authorities’ legal and economic preoccupations, following the main lines of the studied domain. Year by year, accomplishing the regulation programs for the land property brought visible improvements in the life of the population. The present study covers a period of 13 years, beginning with 1878, a reference moment in Romania’s history. My desire is to attentively observe the path of Dobrogea’s modernization which registered a series of important steps due to the efficient involvement of the Romanian state representatives, which led to the development of the province’s agriculture as the main economic force of the region and an instrument of absolute necessity to the welfare of any people. The existence of a large number of archival documents within the central and local institutions, well preserved in the deposits of Bucharest, Constanța and Tulcea, most of them unseen, made me begin a more profound analysis of the historical sources, in order to obtain a synthesis corroborated with multiple situations and aspects. Their investigation substantially filled in the information regarding the instauration of Romanian administration in November 1878, the regulation of the land property and its exploitation. Herewith, I consulted old press, document volumes and numerous researches already published
This commentary thinks with Desiree Fields' ‘Digital Experiments with Landed Property’ across the urban–rural continuum. I offer provisional observations on rural property experiments emerging in ...Central Appalachia in the context of climate change. By way of conclusion, I suggest how scholars might engage and extend Fields' important provocations to deepen understandings of the shifting nature of land and property relations in the rural USA and the stakes thereof for rising authoritarian populism and political possibilities otherwise.
This article shows that landed property can be an exercise of state sovereignty in micro. I argue that property tightly relates to statehood and that the concept of ‘community’ offers us a lens with ...which to investigate that relation. Property's ‘communal’ character in Cyprus often transcends individual rights to ownership. A house belongs not to an individual, but to persons in their capacity as members of either the Greek‐Cypriot or Turkish‐Cypriot constitutional communities of the Republic. Focusing on the moral and political claims that ensue from this premise, I show how refugee Cypriots encounter and rearticulate the state in a variety of institutions as they lay claims to property (periousia) – their own or others’. Consequently, I argue that thinking through ‘community’ contributes to understandings of the linkage between property and statecraft (what I call the state/property nexus). In turn, this allows us to better comprehend statehood in post‐conflict domains.
Abstrait
De la propriété comme une souveraineté in micro : le nexus État/propriété et la « question de Chypre »
Résumé
Le présent article montre que la propriété foncière peut être un exercice de souveraineté de l’État in micro. L'auteur affirme qu'elle est étroitement liée à la notion d’État et que le concept de « communauté » offre un prisme à travers lequel examiner cette relation. À Chypre, le caractère « communal » des propriétés transcende souvent les droits de propriété individuels. Une maison appartient non pas à un individu, mais à des personnes en leur capacité de membres des collectivités constitutionnelles de la République, soit chypriotes grecques, soit chypriotes turques. En se concentrant sur les revendications morales et politiques qui résultent de cette prémisse, l'auteur montre comment les Chypriotes réfugiés rencontrent et reformulent l’État dans diverses institutions en faisant valoir leurs droits sur des propriétés (periousia), que ce soit les leurs ou celles d'autrui. En conséquence, il affirme qu'une réflexion par le biais de la « communauté » aide à comprendre les liens entre propriété et pouvoir de l’État (ce qu'il appelle le « nexus État/propriété ») et que cela permet aussi de mieux appréhender la notion d’État dans le contexte post‐conflictuel.
This article examines the relevance of ground-rent and landed property for the economic and political forms of capital accumulation in Argentina. This specific focus on capitalist development in ...Argentina is more broadly framed as a theoretical intervention within recent debates on Agrarian Marxism, which addresses the major issues under controversy through the lenses of an original methodologically-minded approach to the Marxian critique of political economy. Empirical quantitative evidence for the theoretical discussion is offered through the presentation of an estimate of ground-rent and its appropriation by landowners between 1993 and 2019.
This article examines the interrelationship of race, space, and landed property in the historical development of racially segregated housing geographies in the United States. Using archival methods, ...I directly connect late 18th century land speculation to early 20th century suburban real estate development based on racially restrictive covenants. I investigate the city of Syracuse—a small, post‐industrial city in Upstate New York on unceded Onondaga Nation land and one of the most racially segregated cities in the US. Dispossession, speculation, and homesteading on the “Central New York Military Tract” generated a racialised, spatialised form of property that real estate capitalists later utilised to create and maintain profit‐oriented suburban segregation. This article extends the historical timeline in studies of residential segregation, provides clarity on dispossession and housing inequity in small and mid‐sized cities, and contributes to understanding how processes of racial capitalism operate through private real estate markets.
Resumen
Este artículo examina la interrelación de la raza, el espacio, y propiedad terrateniente en el desarrollo histórico de las geografías de viviendas segregadas basadas en el origen racial en los Estados Unidos. Usando métodos de investigación de archivos, conecto directamente las ocurrencias de especulación de tierras de fines del siglo XVIII con el desarrollo inmobiliario suburbano de principios del siglo XX, cuales fueron basados en convenios racialmente restrictivos. Investigo la ciudad de Syracuse, una ciudad pequeña y posindustrial en el norte del estado de Nueva York en tierras que no han sido cedidas de la Nación Onondaga, y cual es una de las ciudades más segregadas por el origen racial en los EE.UU. El despojo, la especulación y la apropiación de viviendas en la zona militar central de Nueva York “Central New York Military Tract” generaron una forma de propiedad racializada y espacializada que los inmobiliarios capitalistas después utilizaron para crear y mantener segregación suburbana orientada a las ganancias. Este artículo extiende la cronograma histórica en los estudios de segregación residencial, aclara el despojo y la inequidad de vivienda en ciudades pequeñas y medianas, y contribuye al entendimiento de cómo los procesos de capitalismo racial funcionan a través de los mercados inmobiliarios privados.
A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? I argue we should not ...mistake their technological novelty for a break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism. In this article, I situate 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States, showing the history of property innovation in the United States is also one of racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. I interpret current anxieties about ‘robot landlords’ as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance.
To understand the crucial work of property in land in enforcing and sustaining relationships of power between people, it is necessary to analyse the particular manner in which property became ...territorialized. I focus here on one crucial moment in which this occurred - the reconception of the space of landed property in seventeenth century rural England - tracing three domains of practice - surveying, husbandry and law. These forms of expert knowledge did not simply record changes in property's reterritorialization, I suggest, but actively participated in its remaking. As an 'interaction device', territory helped reconstitute changing property relations. While drawing from previous geographies of property, these practices placed an increased importance upon a territorial exclusivity that centred on individual rights, most particularly the right of the individual to exclude others. As such, the legal and practical defence of territory became of more pressing importance. This shift relied on and helped sustain a particular logic of visualization and spatialization, I shall suggest. Increasingly, property became disentangled from a localized nexus of collectively organized relations, and became situated within wider networks of calculation and commodification. The geographies of property forged in this period continue to be important to contemporary life, framing power relations in particular ways. As such, they demand our attention.
Drawing upon recent interpretation of Marx's newly published papers, a debate published in the journal 40 years ago over Marx's theory of rent is revisited, for reassessment as such and to consider ...its relevance for the analysis of contemporary issues.
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