https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4871-2456
![Sample our Environment & Sustainability journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5935/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Environment-Sustainability.jpg"})
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For similar arguments with reference to Vietnam and post-socialist Europe, see Yip and Tran (Citation2015) and Kovács, Wiessner, and Zischner (Citation2013), respectively.
2 Like China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, Cambodia and Laos, 20 Sub-Saharan African countries nationalized land in the 1960s and 1970s (Mabogunje Citation1992). While most have reversed this approach (excluding Ethiopia and Rwanda), customary and public lands are extensive in Sub-Saharan Africa today, including in peri-urban areas, even when they are not state recognized.
3 Until the late 1990s, all land in the urbanizable limits of New Delhi, India's capital city, was officially state owned. As much as a third of this land was acquired from the 1950s through the 1990s for public purpose.
4 I would include the ‘planetary urbanization’ literature's description of all displacement in the global South as ‘neo-Haussmannization’ as an example of this (Merrifield Citation2014), as though all that needs to be known about displacement in the South was already evident in 19th-century Paris.
5 The concentration of non-privatized lands in the South is of course not a coincidence. Twentieth-century nationalist movements and communist revolutions were almost always wrapped up with socialist ideals of collective and public ownership. Nehru in India, Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Castro in Cuba, Goulart in Brazil, Mao in China, and Nyerere in Tanzania all launched ambitious policies of popular entitlement to land and housing. Theories of urbanization that fail to account for the enduring effects of these legacies, that reduce them to a ‘market barrier’, or that ignore the unique political economy and planning regimes that they put in place are unlikely to tell us much about the means, politics or consequences of displacement in such settings.
6 See Searle (Citation2014) for a brilliant example of how real estate capitalists interested in pumping money through the secondary circuit of capital do recognize, and often actively seek to validate, contra Slater, the North–South distinction.
7 I am here following Levien's (Citation2013) sympathetic critique of Harvey's use of ‘accumulation by dispossession'. To summarize: if the capitalist class has the means to use state power to dispossess, why does it have to wait for economic crises to use such means?
8 It should be obvious that I also think developing such concepts requires deeply empirical and often ethnographic field research: you cannot identify variations in land tenure without being able to read local, vernacular land records and without studying how norms of legality are produced by those who use them—that is, the praxeological.
9 For a useful example of how ‘urban revolution’ can be used conceptually to account for patterns of urban change and displacement that do not conform to the post-industrial model Lefebvre described, see Shin (Citation2014) on China.
10 While recognizing the different value systems that can be sustained by fully privatized and less-than-fully privatized land tenure, we should avoid exaggerating the separation between the two and should recognize the huge range of tenure forms that fall under the latter category, varying from almost or partly legal subdivisions to clandestine settlements. Some of these are predominately regulated through the price mechanism, whereas others are far less so. Many such tenures are a part of what Baross (Citation1990) calls a sequential land market, where illegal housing can gradually transition into outright ownership and become governed less by locally embedded rules. Other tenure systems, though, retain heavy customary authority even amidst significant market pressure. Squatter rights can be and are often sold, but usually within local networks. The possibility and form of social regulation is what requires attention and is what I seek to highlight in this paper.
11 As Payne and Durand-Lasserve (Citation2012, 12) note, private tenure ‘permits the almost unrestricted use and exchange of land’.
12 I have also taken the liberty to add brackets in some places to provide the non-South Asianist with a slight bit of contextual background.
13 Because each state in India has its own land revenue codes, the nature of rights to the commons and the definition of different types of commons vary greatly from state to state. Describing the revenue code for Madhya Pradesh, India's second largest state by land area, Ramanathan (Citation2002, 206) notes, ‘There are then at least three kinds of common property regimes that are identified in the Code’, not including forest areas, one of which requires the revenue Collector (a state government official) to maintain a list of provisions for common use of ‘unoccupied lands’ (the nistar patrak).
14 Benjamin and Raman (Citation2011, 44) assert that most informal land settings go well beyond simple ‘adverse possession’ rights. This is because such settings involve contestations within the state, as different branches of the state themselves authorize competing claims to land that cannot in a purely technical fashion reach resolution.
15 Benjamin et al. (Citation2007) note how the Government of Karnataka's electronic land registration and tenure regularization program, called Bhoomi, reduced the number of tenure systems in the state from an astounding 1500 to a still incredibly diverse 256.
16 Gentry: ‘1.a. Rank by birth (usually, high birth; rarely in neutral sense)’ (Oxford English Dictionary).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
D. Asher Ghertner
D. Asher Ghertner is an urban geographer at Rutgers University.
