Research Problem

No land, that government and developers see as future cities in the Global South, is vacant. There is no empty ‘no-man’s land.’ Most of it is already in use. Neither the farmland, grazing land, or forests, nor spontaneous settlements that surround cities and offer prospects for their growth are empty. 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. Land transactions within different, improvised, infrastructural and legal arrangements make space habitable, marketable, and profitable, and, crucially, it makes them look legal. This happens not only by forward-looking legislation or planning. It also happens when people code and re-code access to land and then conjure up legality for facts already existing on the ground. 

Coding is rulemaking, whereas legalization 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. By combining these conceptual perspectives, the programme examines how property develops at the urban frontier from the coding of access to the legalization of property. Mainstream research on peri-urban development tends to be state centric and see diversions from comprehensive plans as a weakness of government and ineffectiveness of law. However, such perspectives fail to acknowledge that there are many competing designs on peri-urban space, and that law may have significant effects even if it does not do what it says it does. The perspective of the proposed project goes beyond state- or society centrism. Governments make laws, but multiple actors also aim to make their land claims appear legal by imitating and emulating law as they imagine it to be. In other words, law is being made from below as well as from above. This creates a paradox: Much of urban development does not follow official legal plans. Instead, real urban development is made to appear legal when land users and public authorities dress up mere possession as property: it becomes legalized. 

The process of legalization is the (temporary) conclusion of another fundamental institutional transformation, namely coding land use. Codes determine who can do what with land. When the asset is being re-classified, the possible rights to it change. One particularly interesting re-coding is when land becomes a commodity and can be transacted in new ways. Commodification signifies change in the valences of assets, often from something common and community entrusted, public, or state entrusted with restricted circulation, to become something which is held individually, and privately, and can be transacted and alienated in more unfettered ways. However, even if commodification of land is an important form of coding, it would be imprudent to assume that it is the only or always most significant one. Commoning of land can happen especially in conjunction with various identity politics. Zoning, protection, and reservation, moreover, may significantly restrict use and transaction of land, and rendering land public by expropriation also offers different political and economic opportunities. Most importantly, in addition to the asset itself, coding also relates to rights subjects (who can benefit?), and what institution has the public authority to rule. Hence, codes refer to a comprehensive view of the property system and is not simply concerned with the attributes of the individual asset. 

Peri-Urban Development: Frontiers, Coding, and Legalization.

Forms of institutions vary greatly over time and from place to place, and solidifying access rights happens through structures such as law, tradition, religion, and so on. These institutions may persist for decades and even centuries without much change. However, sometimes they are challenged and uprooted fundamentally. We conceptualize such moments as frontiers. Frontiers constitute dynamics of institutional destruction and re-creation. Frontier dynamics dissolve existing social orders – property systems and their codes, political jurisdictions, rights, and social contracts – and make way for new institutions of appropriation, dispossession, enclosure, and exclusion. The destruction of existing institutions creates moments when land becomes open for new institutionalization; that is for re-coding and legalization. 

Institutional destruction

Institutional destruction in the form of discursive, political, and physical operations that classify space as ‘vacant’ and resources as ‘free,’ ‘ungoverned,’ ‘natural,’ or ‘uninhabited,’ expunge existing property systems, and justify the dislocation of previous users in the process. Through processes of dispossession, enclosures, resource grabbing, and other forms of primitive accumulation, previously accepted access rights are criminalized, dwellers are turned into squatters, and their land uses are re-labelled as destructive behaviour. 

Institutionalization of resource access

Institutionalisation is shorthand for the dynamics that re-code the property system anew. This includes rights (the nature and duration of use, the types of transfer), the attributes of rights subjects, authorities, jurisdictions, and their different representations. Such re-coding is the outcome of a contentious process of suspending the law and legalizing new claims. Hence, coding access, producing what is acceptable, and prompting the emergence and operation of public authority, is critical to investigate. Legalization is a central form of institutionalization. It consolidates codes. It recognizes claims to rights and authority with reference to law to make them predictable, dependable and enduring features of political life. 

We examine two processes of institutionalization and their interference. On the one hand, we will examine coding of access and land use, and on the other, legalization of land claims. How an asset is coded and what valences it has, gives rise to inquiries into who can have what rights to the asset, on what terms, and how it is decided?

Approach and Data Collection

We collect empirical data on the way institutions erode and how new institutionalisations come into place. 

What Data? We aim to gather data to respond to the three research questions for all locations: 

RQ1)    How do people, companies, and governments change access and land-use codes to urban land?

RQ2)    How do people, companies, and governments consolidate and legalize claims to urban land?

RQ3)    What institutions adjudicating access to land emerge during of urban expansion?

Locations

We focus on secondary cities, large enough to offer variation and flexibility, but not national capitals where national politics may crowd out local politics of the urban frontier. Three locations have been decided: Christian Lund will work in Medan in Indonesia, Mattias Borg Rasmussen will work in Nuequén in Argentina, and Kasper Hoffmann will work in Bukavu in Congo. Postdocs and PhDs will each propose one secondary city in Asia, Latin America or Africa for their respective studies in their applications.