I want to thank you for inviting me here to blog for the next month. I want to introduce you to my co-author, collaborator, and the other half of my brain Lorna Fox O'Mahony. Lorna is at the University of Essex in the UK. Lorna and started working together in 2017 on a project that would ultimately become our book Squatting and the State: Resilient Property in an Age of Crisis available at Cambridge University Press. I am going to spend my time (with help from Lorna) blogging about a methodological intervention we have been making on property law and the need to rethink how we think about property problems. We have 12-13 posts planned out to introduce you to RPT and its approach including a future post about Squatting and the State. We may also post a dialogue about co-authorship and what makes it work
Today we want to talk about our changing world. Liberal property law was developed in a time that is very different from our time today. Advances in technology in the last two centuries have transformed our economies from rural/agriculture production, to industrial production, to knowledge economies. Likewise, advances in travel and the shift to the network society has meant that individuals engage with a broader audience, different cultures and unique perspectives.
In this time, the mechanics for how we engage with property have not stood still, even as the narratives, justifications and ideologies on which property interests are based appear timeless and unassailable. We have seen the transition of property norms from the utility of possession to the legal certainty of recorded title. That transition enabled the increased financialization of property assets with benefits and crises emerging as a result. The 2008 financial crisis was triggered by the over-abstraction of property interests in ways that strained the lived realities of property on the ground.(More on this in future posts).
Since the 1970s, the growth of globalization has increased in both scope and intensity, bringing new paradigms of power, alignments of institutional competencies, and values into view. Both the utility crisis and the currency crisis that erupted in the 1970s placed new strains on a housing infrastructure that was already reeling from disinvestment after federal policy stepped back from investments in public housing infrastructure. And today - those three moments of housing crisis, utility crisis, and financial crisis continue to resonate in a fourth context of environmental stewardship. We face interlocking dilemmas:
- The growth of housing as a financial tool rather than a site for home and family contribute to the erosion of communities, while also making home ownership riskier due to over leveraging;
- Increasing housing demands place pressure to build cheaper housing in environmentally fragile areas, raising the risk of disaster;
- And the demands for more energy consumption in communities have prompted similar questions about the role of private finance and accessibility to new technologies - particularly for poor or disadvantaged communities.
Each of these problems are not ‘private’ but shared, and require, on some level, the participation of the state. Property is implicated in ways that challenge us to think differently about how we understand and work with complexity, and to recognize the effects of our methodological approaches. Most notably, we are interested in how the frames we use to articulate property problems distort our perceptions in ways that undermine our capacity to address these problems in meaningful ways. What we suggest across our research, and through a range of case studies, is a more realistic way of grappling with property as a complex system in which the state’s support for individuals, communities, and institutions (like private property) is not merely an allocation of publicly-backed resilience but embedded in the state’s own resilience needs.
We look forward to hearing from you along the way and hope you engage with comments as we set the development of ‘Resilient Property Theory’ (RPT) through the research agenda we have been on for the last 8 years. In doing so we will highlight works we have written as well as others’ writings that have engaged with RPT to re-imagine a property space for the 21st century.
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