Land Tenure in the Changing Peri‐Urban Areas of Ethiopia: The Case of Bahir Dar City

Ethiopia's urban expansion and development strategy has been based on the acquisition of land by government from adjacent peri‐urban areas. The land in the peri‐urban areas is predominantly agricultural in nature, and it has been held by local farmers or landholders. This article aims to examine the nature of urban expansion and development from the perspective of the land rights of the local peri‐urban landholders. To achieve this purpose, it has employed a case‐study approach. As urban territory extends into adjacent peri‐urban areas, the land rights of local landholders are expected to be automatically cancelled and transferred to people who can pay for a lease. This shows that very little attention is paid to the land rights of local landholders in peri‐urban areas in the process of urban expansion and development. Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that local landholders in those areas have a prevailing sense of insecurity about their land.     

Privatizing the commons: reforming the ejido and urban development in Mexico

Few studies worldwide have analysed how to manage equitably the process whereby ‘customary’ or ‘common’ land can be incorporated into future urban development, particularly in so far as this might be achieved through privatization and deregulation. This paper focuses upon Mexico and the 1991–2 reforms of Article 27 which dramatically changed the tenure codes and political relations covering the widespread customary land sector — called ejidos. It is argued that, in effect, the reforms constitute deregulation of former tenure relations rather than outright privatization, and that rather than being radical in content, the reforms are subtle redefinitions of past practices in which the balance of administrative power over ejidal land has shifted significantly, away from the Agrarian Reform Ministry towards the Social Development Ministry and local (city) government. Deregulation appears to offer three principal scenarios for public and private sector ejido land development: Urban Development Companies, Joint Ventures and Extension to the ‘Urban Zone’, yet to date there is little evidence that any one has proven sufficiently attractive to be pursued intensively, and the paper suggests that illegal alienation of ejido land is likely to continue and may get worse. However, the latest Urban Development Program 1995–2000 identifies ejido land deregulation and urban development as one of its principal strategies, tied to President Zedillo’s New Federalism project, which seeks to strengthen municipal and state government capacity and effectiveness. This profound shift in the structure of political managerial authority and responsibility offers the increased likelihood that land regularization practices and urban planning of the now deregulated ejidos will become more significant in the future.     

Accumulation without Dispossession? Land Commodification and Rent Extraction in Peri‐urban China

The urbanization of rural China is increasingly achieved not through physical land grabs but the strategic enrolment of rural communities in the commodification of land via speculative rentiership. This article critically examines this shift in approach from the deployment of extra‐economic force in state‐led land expropriations toward an increasing reliance on market mechanisms in land development. A case study, the construction of a financial district in peri‐urban Guangzhou, shows that the enrolment of village communities is achieved through their cooptation as corporatist market players in regimes of rent‐based accumulation. While the apparent use of voluntaristic market exchange has reduced the need for coercion, however, the commodification process has at the same time created new terrain for dispossessory practices whereby value is illicitly extracted and seized by elites through rent relations. The shift from overt land grabbing to more covert mechanisms of value appropriation has important implications for rural class relations and contentious politics.     

BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE: Heterogeneous Governance,Claims Making and Forced Eviction in a Megacity

Residents of informal settlements worldwide face challenges defending their land tenure. In contexts with overlapping systems of governance these challenges are even more complex and claims to land tenure more precarious. How do heterogeneous systems of governance, a characteristic of some global South megacities, affect evictions? This article presents an in-depth case study of the informal Otodo Gbame waterfront settlement's struggle to defend its customary land tenure through multiple authorities in Lagos, Nigeria. The analysis reveals how a heterogeneous system of governance disempowers citizens by obscuring the locus of power and creating confusion when communities make claims on the state. Communities find themselves claiming rights to the city that receive varying degrees of recognition from the many authorities within the heterogeneous system. In Lagos, the state weaponizes this heterogeneous system in pursuit of modern development and urban growth.     

我国现行土地市场的结构分析

改革开放初期,基于对现实国情的考量,我国城乡土地市场实行了不同的管理体制,进而形成了二元土地制度格局。文章从土地市场改革的历程入手,分析造成土地市场二元分裂的原因,再将对城乡二元土地制度的危害进行了深度剖析,最后提出城乡土地市场一体化的政策建议。     

农户城乡“两栖占地”形成因素、退地制度障碍与政策建议——基于“百村调查”样本分析

城乡"两栖占地"形成受土地保障功能牵制、土地收益功能吸引、乡情乡愁牵绊、城乡文化差异阻滞等因素影响。城乡"两栖占地"农户宅基地退出存在宅基地所有权主体虚位、使用权权能残缺、宅基地产权与房屋产权分离、使用权登记制度不完善等制度障碍。"百村调查"结论如下:农村"两栖占地"情况严重;农村"两栖占地"者多为经济实力较强的"能人";影响"两栖占地"农户退地的主要因素是"留恋乡情"。促进"两栖占地"农户退地的政策建议为:民主施政,让宅基地制度改革代表最广大农民的利益;科学施政,让宅基地退出政策更加符合农户愿望;精准施政,让政府宅基地退出行为更加人性化;重建信誉,让农户在宅基地退出中更加拥有获得感。     

Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri-urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non-reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.     

Urban Ecological Enclosures: Conservation Planning,Peri-urban Displacement,and Local State Formations in China

Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri-urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri-urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site-specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi-state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post-socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city-level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.     

重庆市城乡统筹发展与土地改革浅析

本文通过对统筹城乡发展内涵介绍,结合重庆市为统筹城乡发展所做的土地改革探索,分析了重庆市土地承包经营权入股改革、"地票"制度建立及农村土地交易所创设、农民转市民农村集体土地退出与利用探索对于重庆市统筹城乡发展的意义,重庆市在土地改革上的探索为确保国家统筹城乡综合配套改革试验区顺利推进,打破城乡二元结构,缩小城乡差距发挥了重要作用。文章最后提出为实现城乡统筹发展,土地改革要以充分保障农民权益为前提,土地改革的重点是要建立城乡统一的土地市场。     

Space Grabs: Colonizing the Vertical City

Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega-city skylines through the proliferating number and height of high-rises in both central cities and peri-urban developments. We investigate how floor area ratio policies, originally designed to control densification, have been reworked to facilitate densification through floor area uplift. Thus a tool originally developed to advance public welfare has been used to facilitate the profitability of real estate projects for developers and to benefit local governments. Taking DKI Jakarta as our case study, we sketch out the coevolution of this policy with urban regimes, focusing on the mid-2010s when compensation measures were formalized and made transparent. By using a particular project in Jakarta's central business district we show how the benefits of floor area uplift favor private sector developers over the local government. In a context of rapidly increasing land values, increasing demand for housing from an emergent middle class, and particularly the privatization of planning, this unevenness systematically favors the private sector.     

A policy proposal for natural resource management in the rainforest of Madre de Dios,Peru: The concession system and land tenure reform

Madre de Dios in south-eastern Peru, like other tropical regions, faces important threats that are resulting in a loss of forest resources. The predominant types of land tenure in the rural zones of Madre de Dios are mining, agricultural and forestry concessions of land given by each Ministry to the settlers. Concessionaires fail to act as owners, because concession contracts do not guarantee secure property rights. Short-term non-sustainable land uses are favored over sustained management practices. The way in which people use the natural resources depends upon the allocation of rights over those resources. Considering communal property as a policy proposal: a system of land tenure which does not facilitate legal titling of the lands occupied by settlers and loggers will continue to hinder the possibility of developing sustainable long-term management strategies. In this article, the main proposal for a policy reform is that the land tenure system of concessions currently employed by the Peruvian government must be replaced with the assignment of legal communal land titles to the settlers' communities (not to isolated individuals) who are currently occupying forest lands in the region. The communal land titles would create an incentive for privately motivated group management of the forests, which could help reverse some of the wasteful and indiscriminate uses of land currently government-owned.     

企业私有化程度提高则社会环境会变差？

从企业私有化角度出发,构建二元经济理论模型和实证模型分析私有化对环境污染的影响。理论研究发现,由于城市部门资本密集程度高于农村部门,而且如果农村劳动者从环境改善中获得的边际效用小于城市劳动者从环境改善中获得的边际效用,那么提高私有化导致单位产出污染排放减少时会引起：（1）劳动和资本要素会向城市流动,城市工业部门产出增加;农业部门由于劳动和资本流出而导致产出减少,即城市扩张而农村收缩;(2)城市地区的失业总人数会增加;(3)私有化导致单位产出污染排放减少的效应大于工业产出增加导致污染排放增加的效应,最终导致社会环境改善,但如果私有化导致单位产出污染排放增加,则会得出相反的结论。实证结果表明：企业私有化水平提高有利于降低单位产出固体废物、废水、二氧化硫和烟尘等污染物的排放,资本投入也有利于降低单位产出污染物的排放。     

Equity,Fairness and Justice Implications of Land Tenure Formalization in Cameroon

This article examines Cameroon's modern land policy. Initially, it traces the policy's roots to the colonial era. As the only African country that came under the control of three European colonial powers, viz. Germany, Britain and France, Cameroon provides a unique opportunity to understand colonialism's influence on Africa's persistent land problem. This is because the problem is structurally embedded in the historical processes of colonial rule. The heart of the article focuses on the policy's provisions for land tenure formalization, especially the land titling process. Of interest are the implications of this process for questions of equity, fairness and justice as they relate to access to land in the country. It suggests that, contrary to what proponents claim, land tenure formalization is not a panacea enabling capital accumulation for all. The article marshals evidence to show that the land tenure formalization requirements in Cameroon have effectively served to aggravate socioeconomic inequalities in the country. This is especially because the requirements favour societal elites, including bureaucrats, politicians and entrepreneurs. The article concludes that, by making government‐issued land titles the unique testament to landownership, the country's indigenous authorities have aggravated the problem of inequitable, unfair and unjust access to land that they inherited from their colonial predecessors.     

Entanglements of Periphery and Informality in Mexico City

Mexico City is a well‐known case of urban expansion. Most of the growth has been in its peripheries, occurring during two phases of housing privatization: a predominantly self‐built urbanization by residents establishing irregular settlements (starting in the 1930s); and a relatively recent surge of mass‐produced small‐scale single‐family housing built by state‐sponsored development companies (underway since the year 2000). Informality, we argue, should not be understood as a mode of housing production setting in opposition self‐build practices against industry‐led and/or state‐sponsored processes, but rather as a dialectical urbanization logic shaped by the entanglements of in/formal processes in governance practices, land privatization and regularization, and urban infrastructure and services deficits. We are particularly interested in a dominant narrative whereby the embeddedness of informality is constantly underplayed and irregular settlements are cast as a residual category, a problem to tolerate or in need of intervention, or the inevitable combination of demographic growth and housing shortage, rather than the direct outcome of urban policies and development processes. Conversely, recent housing policy in Mexico is officially narrated as an economic stimulus, a means to control and order (irregular) urban expansion, and an impulse to democratize homeownership. Our discussion of the entanglements of informality in Mexico City is based on an extended literature review of academic articles and official reports (predominantly in English), supplemented by a series of street and neighborhood explorations (in the summers of 2012 and 2013) across the metropolis.     

RISK‐COPING,LAND TENURE AND LAND MARKETS: AN OVERVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Over the last decades, a significant amount of literature has been published on informal risk‐coping in developing countries. In this paper, we review how informal risk‐coping has been addressed in the land tenure literature from two main perspectives: a first stream of research looks at how customary tenure and communal property perform key informal risk‐coping functions. A second subset of this literature analyses how informal risk‐coping creates land market imperfections through sharecropping or distress sales. The segmentation of the literature results from the Demsetzian property rights framework. Further research on risk‐coping and land tenure would benefit from examining recent work on property regimes.     

Increasing the Impact of Heterodox Work: Insights from RoSE

To help understand what enhances the prospects for heterodox work to have strong research impact, this article analyzes the pool of articles published in the Review of Social Economy in the past 15 years, aiming to identify what differentiates well‐cited articles from others. Well‐cited papers tend to be in areas of core concern in social economics (labor, health, social theory) and attract attention in related social sciences and policy fields. Yet about half the articles published in RoSE are not cited in another scholarly journal within three years of publication, suggesting that, as well done and interesting as these papers may be, problems like narrow focus seem to limit their influence on other people's work. The article's results suggest that increasing the impact of heterodox work requires articles to be interesting and accessible to intentionally broad audiences, and to prompt people to change their thinking. Better still if they open up channels of communication between diverse communities of scholars that are likely to be sustained.     

Building,Marketing and Living in an Islamic Gated Community: Novel Configurations of Class and Religion in Istanbul

This article analyses the development and marketing of Islamic gated communities in Basaksehir, Istanbul. It demonstrates how a blueprint of public–private urban development was appropriated by middle‐class Islamists. The gated communities in Basaksehir—which, at the outset, were not explicitly religious—gradually became attractive to religious actors searching for enclosed urban enclaves where Islamic communities would be protected against perceived moral‐urban threats. While urban‐religious enclaves appear to bear similarities to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the rise of contemporary Islamic gated communities should be understood in light of the recent coming to power of the Islamist Turkish government. In cooperation with this government, housing development agencies approached Islamic investors to find capital for their public–private housing projects. One of the results of this form of urban development is that, contrary to pre‐modern Ottoman Islamic urban enclaves, the Islamic gated communities are homogenous in terms of economic class, catering specifically to the Islamic middle classes. Moreover, people who invest in Basaksehir desire an urban‐religious lifestyle that differs from the ‘traditional' religious lifestyle experienced in ‘traditional' Islamic neighbourhoods. The specific urban‐religious configuration generates a new type of Islam that better fits middle‐class values and a middle‐class lifestyle.     

Delivering Flagship Projects in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism: State‐led Privatization and the London Olympics 2012

Much of the urban studies literature on the London Olympics has focused on its social legacies and the top‐down nature of policy agendas. This article explores one element that has been less well covered — the contractual dynamics and delivery networks that have shaped infrastructure provision. Drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests, this article explores the mechanisms involved in the project's delivery and their implications for broader understandings of urban politics and policymaking. It assesses contemporary writings on regulatory capitalism, public–private networks and new contractual spaces to frame the empirical discussion. This article argues that the London Olympic model has been characterized by the prioritization of delivery over representative democracy. Democratic imperatives, such as those around sustainability and employment rights, have been institutionally re‐placed and converted into contractual requirements on firms. This form of state‐led privatization of the development process represents a new, and for some, potentially more effective mode of governance than those offered by traditional systems of regulation and management.     

开展社会主义新农村建设的土地政策分析

土地是十分宝贵和稀缺的不可替代的重要资源,具有十分重要的基础地位。社会主义新农村建设的成败与土地息息相关。本文通过对集体土地流转、城乡建设用地增减挂钩和土地整理三个土地政策的分析,揭示土地政策在推动社会主义新农村建设中的重要作用。     

快速城市化背景下的土地问题述评

改革开放以后,我国迅速进入到了快速城市化阶段,而快速城市化与快速经济增长互为因果,成为我国转型发展的主要动力。土地制度的改革是三十年来我国经济体制改革的重要组成部分,也是我国城市快速扩张及工业高速发展的重要动力。但是,我国城市化进程中的土地问题也非常突出:一方面,土地生产要素的紧缺已成为我国东部沿海发达地区最大的"门槛",耕地保护因此面临巨大压力;另一方面,土地资产的暴涨也引致了房价暴涨等严重的社会不公问题,"以地生财"的土地财政成为社会关注的焦点。因此,土地制度的改革仍然是我国经济体制改革的重点,而建立统一的城乡土地市场、改革"土地财政"、强化城市增长管理、抑制城市蔓延则是土地制度改革的重点。