Polyrational property: rules for the many uses of land

Abstract

Abstract:Land uses are what land users do. When spatial planners and other policymakers promote or preclude certain land uses, they interfere with the rights of the users of land, most notably with property. The technical term for what connects land uses, planning, and property is land policy. My paper has a simple message: Good land policy provides a diversity of land uses with plural property relations. No single kind of property rules fits the purposes of all types of land uses. A detached single family house is not like a community garden, nor a highway like a retail chain. Each land use needs its own property "fingerprint." In everyday practice, private and common property relations often accommodate a wide variety of demands made by the owners and users of land. Many theories of property and land policy, however, fail to recognize plural property relations. The simple message of my paper seeks to reconcile practice and theory. A polyrational theory of planning and property identifies eight types of land uses, each type needing its own kind of property rules. The eight types of land uses are: insular, opportunistic, kinship, collaborative, corporate, structural, container, and environmental uses of land. Polyrational land policy makes sure that desirable land uses are enveloped by appropriate property relations.

Categorizing urban commons: Community gardens in the Rhine-Ruhr agglomeration, Germany

“…Our results of diverse styles of uses confirm the diversity of resource use and the diversity of property right regimes studied by Huong and Berkes (2011) and Davy (2014). This diversity enables us to systemize gardens according to their degree of collectivity.…”

Plural Values of Land: An Empirical Investigation

“…114-117;Klick & Parchomovsky 2017;Merrill, 1998;Yang, 2018). A minority group of scholars argues that the right to exclude is to be sine qua non (Alexander & Peñalver, 2012), whereas, in others, it is not so (Davy, 2014). Among many aspects of territorial values of land, the participants of the study were not particularly rigid about excluding others.…”

“…Albeit independently but simultaneously, there has been a resurgence of developing an understanding of values of land beyond monetary price. Scholars have looked from an ecological value of land (Sander et al, 2016), planning laws (Evans, 2004)-planning, law and property rights (Davy, 2012(Davy, , 2014, and international expropriation laws (Alterman, 2010), negotiation and power (Dey Biswas, 2020a;Wang et al, 2020); and philosophy and economics (Anderson, 1993(Anderson, /1995Sandel, 2009Sandel, , 2012. Others went towards the neoclassical quantitative direction with analytical non-linear models and descriptive theorisation (Gluszak & Zygmunt, 2018;Han et al, 2020;Ma et al, 2020).…”

Spatiality of the Commons

“…The task of land-use and urban planners, from this perspective, is to ensure a complementary balance of private and public goods in the city capable of benefiting all inhabitants. This idea of plural property relations is developed further in this special feature (Davy 2014).…”