Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs.

This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development.

Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular.

Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

ISBN-13: 9781501753961

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Publication Date: 03-15-2021

Pages: 342

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

Age Range: 18 Years

Series: Cornell Land: New Perspectives on Territory, Development, and Environment

D. Asher Ghertner is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. He is author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi. Robert W. Lake is Professor Emeritus in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He is co-editor of The Power of Pragmatism.

What People are Saying About This

Thomas F. Purcell

Land Fictions not only speaks to and builds from existing literature, but also offers original theoretical and empirical contributions to the exciting interdisciplinary literatures on the political economy of land.

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani

Land Fictions brilliantly stands alone in the literature on the growing global phenomenon of land commodification. Delightfully written, Ghertner and Lake's volume maintains a deep theoretical edge, which makes it a necessary contribution to the field.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Land Fictions and the Politics of Commodification in City and Country, by D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake
1. Fictitious but Not Utopian: Land Commodification and Dispossession in Rural India, by Michael Levien
2. Fictions of Surplus: Commodifying Public Land in Canada and the United Kingdom, by Brett Christophers and Heather Whiteside
3. Fictions of Safety: Defensive Storylines in Global Property Investment, by Sarah Knuth
4. Ground Fictions: Soil, Property, and Markets in the Colombian Conflict, by Meghan Morris
5. Narratives of Waste: The Fictions and Frictions of Land Commodification in Liberalizing India, by Sai Balakrishnan
6. Rental Fictions: Speculating in Rent-Regulated Housing, by Benjamin Teresa
7. The Fiction of Formalization: Titles, Concessions, and the Politics of Landownership in Cambodia, by Michael L. Dwyer
8. Regularization and the Fictions of Planning "Unauthorized Delhi", by D. Asher Ghertner
9. The Sanctuary of the Collective: Contesting the Fictions of State-Led Land Commodification in Peri-Urban Guangzhou, by Mi Shih
10. Rights Gone Wrong on the City's Edge: The Fictions and Fetishes of Land Documents in Ho Chi Minh City, by Erik Harms
11. Where Materiality Meets Subjectivity: Locating the Political in the Contested Fiction of Urban Land in Camden, New Jersey, by Robert W. Lake
12. The State of Land Grabs: Regulatory Fictions in Ghana's "Small-Scale" Gold Mining Sector, by Heidi Hausermann and David Ferring
Afterword: Land Fictions in the Longue Durée, by Michael Watts

Show More