The End of Sprawl? Not so Fast

This article takes a careful look at the recent state of sprawl among America’s 178 largest metropolitan areas through the lens of four sets of questions: (a) Measured at the metropolitan level, is sprawl really declining? Is it declining everywhere, or just in selected metropolitan areas? (b) If sprawl is indeed declining, are more compact growth forms on the rise? (c) If sprawl is indeed declining, is it the result of antisprawl land use and development policies? (d) Which metropolitan-level land market, demographic, and economic factors are most associated with changes in sprawl? It concludes that sprawl is indeed declining when measured by average population densities, but that the decline has been much less widespread if measured in terms of population growth in core-area neighborhoods, changing density gradient intercept and slope estimates, and increased employment clustering. In terms of policy, it finds no evidence that local regulatory regimes or growth management programs have had any effect on sprawl, but finds that the consistent administration of local regulatory programs in ways that incentivize infill development and send consistent signals to developers does contribute to reduced sprawl.     

The Freedom Charter: the contested South African land issue

The Freedom Charter represents a desire to create a society that is based on common citizenship and democracy in a society divided in all aspects of its life. This paper problematises and interrogates the Charter’s theoretical and philosophical claim on land. It uses the methodology of Afrocentricity and Africana critical theory to dispute the theoretical and philosophical basis of the Freedom Charter. The paper argues that the understanding, desire and vision of the Freedom Charter are irreconcilable. It concludes that the Charter reconciles the dispossessed with their dispossession, reflecting coloniality and white domination in South Africa.     

Fighting rural poverty,inequality and low productivity through legal empowerment of the poor

The purpose of this essay is to introduce the work of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) to the broader academic community interested in the challenge of eradicating rural poverty and promoting the structural and institutional changes which underpin such a challenge. While rural development research in the past has included work on several components of the legal empowerment of the poor (LEP) agenda such as property and labour rights, much less attention has been given to the other two pillars of the framework – access to justice and rule of law and business rights – which together constitute the four pillars of LEP. However the real difference and value added is the power of the systemic interaction among the pillars and the empowerment approach to change. In this approach, change is initiated bottom up with legal identity, organisations, information, and voice of the poor. In other words an active citizenry, complemented by a democratic and effective state. None of this happens naturally as vested interests and skewed power and asset relationships are bound to get in the way of change to greater equity. Such change is only likely to come through iterative contestations between organisations of the poor, the middle class, and the state. This approach is not presented as a panacea but one which will hopefully complement and accelerate what is already working.     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Land reforms and voluntary resettlement: household participation and attrition rates in Malawi

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the factors influencing household participation in and withdrawal from a World Bank-funded voluntary resettlement scheme moving 15,000 low-income farming households within and across rural districts in Malawi. Using a survey of 203 beneficiary households, focus groups and in-depth interviews, we identify a lack of access to land and conflict over land in the area of origin as salient participation factors in resettlement, while withdrawal factors include lower access to infrastructure and poor soil quality in resettlement areas. We also highlight limited prior awareness of actual conditions in resettlement areas, low and biased participation in the decision to move, a greater desire for formal land titles due to loss of customary entitlement as a result of resettlement, and widespread ambiguity and confusion over titles for resettled plots. In this context, we point to a pattern of ‘negative resettlement’, in which households remain resettled despite major grievances, for lack of an alternative option, contrasting with ‘positive resettlement’, where households remain by choice. We suggest that intra-district resettlement is more likely to be successful than inter-district resettlement when there is a risk of informed consent deficiency. These findings point to the relative failures of this particular resettlement scheme, and suggest possible improvements for land redistribution schemes from agro-industrial projects to poor households.     

Keeping ‘our’ land: property,agriculture and tensions between Indigenous and settler visions of food sovereignty in Canada

ABSTRACT

This paper situates literature on food sovereignty and land reforms in relation to academic and popular writings about land issues in Canada. We argue that settler Canadian food sovereignty scholarship and activism has yet to sufficiently grapple with the implications of private property ownership in relation to ongoing processes of settler colonialism. We also argue that efforts to advance ecologically sustainable farming practices in Canada need to confront private property ownership in terms of its contribution to both capitalist and colonial violence.     

Territories of peace: alter-territorialities in Colombia’s San José de Apartadó Peace Community

ABSTRACT

Scholars are increasingly re-theorizing territory beyond the nation-state given Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups’ demands for ‘territory’ as they confront land grabbing in Latin America. Yet alternative territorialities are not limited to such ethnic groups. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research between 2011 and 2016, I explore the relational territoriality produced by a peasant ‘peace community’ in San José de Apartadó, Colombia. By tracing the collective political subject produced by the Peace Community’s active production of peace through a set of spatial practices, places and values, which include massacre commemorations, food sovereignty initiatives and Indigenous–peasant solidarity networks, this contribution presents a conceptual framework for analyzing diverse territorial formations.     

The debate on food sovereignty theory: agrarian capitalism,dispossession and agroecology

This contribution reviews recent critiques of the food sovereignty framework. In particular it engages with the debate between Henry Bernstein and Philip McMichael and analyzes their different conceptualizations of agrarian capitalism. It critically identifies tendencies in food sovereignty approaches to assume a food regime crisis, to one-sidedly emphasize accumulation by dispossession and enclosure and thereby to overlook the importance of expanded reproduction, and to espouse a romantic optimism about farmer-driven agroecological knowledge which is devoid of modern science. Alternatives to current modernization trajectories cannot simply return to the peasant past and to the local. Instead, they need to recognize the desires of farmers to be incorporated into larger commodity networks, the importance of industrialization and complex chains for feeding the world population, and the support of state and science, as well as social movements, for realizing a food sovereign alternative.     

Redistribution and recognition: land reforms in Kerala and the limits of culturalism

The most important achievements of the Communist governments in Kerala, India were the implementation of the land reforms and the legislation of the Agricultural Workers' Act. Using ethnographic and archival research based on these events and the processes through which they became a reality, this paper will question some of the fundamental assumptions of the influential Subaltern Studies project and postcolonial theory like the positing of governmentality and passive revolution as the general characteristics of ‘Third World’ societies' experience with modernity. It will argue that, more importantly, their culturalist framework, with its gross ignorance of class and material concerns, is hardly adequate to understand the fusing of the aspirations of recognition and redistribution or the material and cultural that characterizes the struggles by the peasantry and agrarian labor, and their synthesis by the Communist Party. Despite their professed aim of inaugurating a democratic project with the peasant as citizen, Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory, unlike the Communist movement, do not envisage any material transformation of the agrarian classes that will actualize this objective.