Reinvigorating the Concept of Land Tenure for American Urban Geography

Abstract

Tenure rights are durable privileges to use and benefit from specific pieces of land. In the USA, tenure rights are typically conceptually folded into the ‘bundle of rights’ associated with formal land ownership. Legally, this model rests on well‐documented principles: private, serial, single‐party property ownership and clear, well‐regulated surveying. However, tenure does not begin and end in property. People negotiate the terms under which they use spaces – and the durability of those terms – through implicit and explicit social processes. Many geographers focused on US cities have tacitly conceded that existing forms of tenure are adequately captured in the concept of property rights despite extensive discussion about the complex construction of non‐property rights in the development literature. This article argues that a vocabulary adapted from the conversation about land tenure, specifically regarding use and usufruct rights, would enhance the ‘critical property’ literature by exposing additional, already‐existing rights in land.

Food production in the city: (re)negotiating land, food and property

“…We document the ways in which urban residents with limited access to land negotiate usufruct rights to urban land. Usufruct rights, a millennia-old concept, bestow non-owners with access to land and the spoils it yields (Goldie 1985, Pierce 2010. We discuss three cases in Toronto that problematise the notion of private property through usufruct rights: a downtown, squatted urban farm; suburban backyards, transformed into farm demonstration plots cultivated by youth; and central city backyards, conscripted into a quasi-commercial, discontiguous urban farm.…”

The Production of Community in Community Land Trusts

“…These movements are instructive because, on the one hand, they were 20th century (often explicitly post‐colonial) movements, and thus products of their time. On the other hand, they often drew their inspirations from historic, pre‐colonial forms of land ownership and use which were communal and which emphasized the “durability” of these forms of land tenure (see Pierce ). These pre‐colonial forms of durable communal land tenure, such as those of the Aztecs, which were invoked during the ejido movement, were based on familial inheritance of use rights, if it was used for crop production (see Caso ).…”

Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons

“…It is a set of social practices and performances that are open to negotiation and require constant upkeep and maintenance for their reproduction (Blomley, 2016;Keenan, 2010;Velicu & García-López, 2018). Property is most recognizable as a "bundle of rights," including use, access, usufruct, improvement, sale, the right to exclude others, and the right not to be excluded; but it is also something made and remade through everyday practices (Blomley, 2008;Pierce, 2010). Such practices include the negotiation of the rights described above, as well as practices of appropriation, occupation, inhabitance, care, responsibility, and stewardship.…”

“…Indeed, jam production can be seen as an element of stewardship of the literal fruits of the land, and thus, of the value of the land. But, the desire for a collective land title should not be confused with neoliberal forms of land titling that work to formalize and individualize informal forms of collective ownership (Pierce, 2010), producing even more exclusions. Community Land Trusts offer one example of collective ownership which retains group access and contracts stewardship of the land.…”