Urban Frontiers. From Illegal Land Occupation to Legalized Property

Introduction

No land that government and developers see as future cities in the Global South is vacant. There is no empty ‘no-man’s land.’ Individual citizens, social movements, squatters, and urban developers already engage in making their land use look legal. Urban property development in the Global South often starts out in illegality. Only subsequently does it become legal. This project explains how.

Research Context

Mainstream research on the Global South sees urban land in technical terms of rapid urbanization and the challenges of providing sufficient housing, infrastructure, and services. Yet, if we fail to understand the significance of institutional transformation of urban land, we will not understand the future political landscape in the Global South, as landed property is the pivot around which government and citizenship turn.

Project Objectives

With this project, I develop and combine two new concepts to explain how people - and not just the state - code access to land and then conjure up legality for facts already existing on the ground.

1. Coding: This refers to rulemaking.
2. Legalization: This gives a rule the quality of law.

A rule’s quality as law is not intrinsic to the rule itself, but something attributed to it in social and political interaction. Governments make laws, but the originality of the present project lies in determining how multiple actors aim to make their land claims appear legal as if they were sanctioned and approved by state and law.

Methodology

My team and I will collect material evidence, which includes:

• Artefacts from archives
• Material structures
• Physical markers and signs
• Boundaries
• Documents and other expressions not produced directly for us

Additionally, we will gather ethnographic testimonies from:

• Residents
• Land users
• Civil servants
• Lawyers
• Politicians
• Developers

This will help establish how illegal land use is made to look legal.

Case Studies

Nine conflict case studies will be conducted in peri-urban areas of cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by:

• 1 Professor (PI)
• 3 Associate Professors
• 3 Postdocs
• 3 PhDs