Session details
Organizer(s)
Tim Verlaan (Amsterdam Centre for Urban History) and Monika Motylinska (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space)
Keywords
Landownership, Property, Right to the City
Abstract
This session investigates patterns of landownership and property rights in urban settlements across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Who owns our cities is a question that frequently resurfaces in academic and popular debate, from the anarchist writings by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to the recent work of Saskia Sassen. The organization of ownership radically impacts residential, consumption and investment patterns, and ultimately shapes the layout and functioning of our cities. Employing an inclusive notion of ownership that surpasses judicial definitions, the aim of our session is to scrutinize how land claims and land grabs have influenced the physical and social fabric of cities inside and outside of the European continent. By extent, we are interested in the actors exercising ownership rights, their methods to support their claims, and the actors who disputed such claims.
The question of ownership matters as landowners influence how and where people live, work, play and travel. As land is a scarce resource, it endows its owners with power and wealth. Ultimately, it is they who decide how land and the structures on it get used. Because discussions over ownership usually take place behind closed doors and property rights do not always leave a physical imprint, urban historians working on the modern period have largely left the topic untouched. Heading to the call in Richard Rodger’s keynote lecture at the preceding EAUH conference, we invite historians of the modern period to add to a more comprehensive and multifaceted narrative of urban landownership.
Proposed papers may discuss a number of interrelated topics, but we are particularly interested in methods of making landownership visible through mapping and other digital tools, long-term developments and interdependencies.
We invite papers :
- examining ways in which ownership has influenced the built environment in material and immaterial ways
- papers investigating how land ownership and the methods of landowners have contributed to spatial segregation and economic disparity
- papers discussing the coalitions and conflicts that have emerged over property rights.
Papers
Urban Agents and Rental Market: The Reproduction of São Paulo City in the Late Nineteenth Century
Author(s)
Monique Borin (University of Campinas)
Keywords
São Paulo, Rent Market, Colonialism
Abstract
São Paulo is one of the cities in the Americas to receive one of the largest contingents of immigrants from Europe in the late nineteenth to the twentieth century. The city's population quadruples between 1890 and 1910 mainly due to the immigration wave, but also as an effect of internal migration, after the abolition of slavery in 1888. In this paper, we deal with the dynamics of land ownership and urban real estate in Liberdade, a neighborhood located south of the historical centrality of São Paulo. We start from a case study of a Portuguese immigrant, Possidônio Ignácio das Neves, an urban agent with a significant concentration of property in the neighborhood, to discuss the relationship between massive immigration, slavery and the dynamics of land ownership and urban real estate in territory signed by colonialism. Possidônio Ignácio das Neves commissioned the construction of several types of houses in Liberdade to make them available in the rental market. His investments were mainly concentrated in large-scale working villages, using massively the interior of the allotment whose only complied with the minimum of sanitary measures and prescriptions determined by the rules, sometimes bypassing them. We based on cross-checking sources for this study: we analyzed the “Obras particulares” (private´s construction requirements) and inventories to size Neves's property and map it across the neighborhood, relating them to “autos crime” (criminal records) to understand the conflicting relationships of this urban agent with the tenants of the houses he rented through the neighborhood. Liberdade's population was mixed, composed by diverse social classes, and was also an important neighborhood within the ritual practices of the Afro-Brazilian population. The dynamics of land ownership and urban real estate in this neighborhood thus establish connections with the conformation of the regular free labor market in the country, allowing us to approach the issues that link urbanization in the period, the construction and maintenance of inequalities in the post-abolition period. São Paulo is one of the cities that pass for a great accumulation of capital for its own reproduction, based on the urban business of urban land allotments sale, and, mainly, to the rent market.
Residential Space and the Internal Dynamics of the City
Author(s)
Richard Rodger (University of Edinburgh)
Keywords
Rents and Housing Markets, Spatial Characteristics, Agents
Abstract
This presentation will explore particular features of the internal dynamics of the city. Based on a transcription and analysis of 34,000 records of residential rental assessments for Edinburgh in 1860 it is possible to develop a profile of the housing market developed according to occupation, street, gender, and marital status. It also permits an analysis of the role of agents and factors, institutions and trusts. A revealing outcome is an index of the affordability of residential space relative to each occupation in the city. This provides a more subtle understanding of the diversity of residential space within and between streets and is an indicator of the strength or weakness of demand according, for example, to occupational categories and gender. To this statistical underpinning of the city and its residential characteristics is added a spatial dimension.
‘Volkseigentum’ in the GDR: People’s Property Coalitions and Conflicts over Property Rights and Practical Usage in 1980s East Berlin
Author(s)
Kathrin Meißner (Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space)
Keywords
Landownership, Civic Engagement, Bottom-up Appropriation
Abstract
The GDR’s state regulation of economy in general and housing in specific meant substantial restructuring of property conditions and land law. Formally defined as ‘people’s property’ (‘Volkseigentum’) all power was hold by the centralised one-party-government of Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In general, three different types of socialist property were classified and meant different terms of usage: 1) society’s, 2) corporative and, 3) organisational ‘Volkseigentum’. Housing politics were strictly administrated on municipality level by the local administration, giving little room for manoeuvre for alternative arrangements. Due to stated determinations of rents, the value of the property and the increasing economic scarcity in the 1980s state subsidies became more and more necessary to cover costs, especially for preserving historic residential buildings. The paper examines along one case study from East Berlin during the 1980s the contradiction of formal property rights and its set limits of usage and the practical use by the citizens. In East Berlin, inner city housing was dominated by historic structures which were mainly constructed between 1875 and 1914 and faced an ongoing deterioration. Hence, the involvement of the people in preservation measures played a significant role in the socialist system. By various programmes of the mass organisation ‘Nationale Front’ such as the ‘Mach Mit’ initiatives people’s voluntary work were propagated as a contribution of building the socialist state. Formally, citizens could get permission for particular uses of state property (such as construction of housing, gardening as well as leisure activities) by temporary contracts. Therein, the concrete tasks and responsibilities of the people were listed. In case of not allowed usage (due to the contract content) the whole agreement could get cancelled. The case of ‘Hirschhof’ park shows how the formal ‘Volkseigentum’ was subverted by civic engagement as an alternative form of appropriating space. It illustrates how neighbourhood initiatives used the structures of local municipal administration to infiltrate the system and legitimise their interests in neighbourhood development. Referring to the session’s topic, along this case study the contrast between owning land by law and gaining the power to shape this space will be examined.
Ownership in Colonial Cities shaped by “Gens d’ailleurs”: Writing Urban Histories of Central-African Cities beyond the Colonizer/colonized Paradigm
Author(s)
Johan Lagae (Ghent University)
Keywords
Colonial Cities, Archival Sources, Ownership
Abstract
This presentation addresses some of the methodological challenges of studying 20th century colonial cities in Central-Africa as products of a complex interplay between a multitude of actors, which require to think the issue of ‘ownership’ beyond the colonizer/colonized paradigm. While for quite some time now, urban historians working on Africa have acknowledged the agency of colonial subjects in the making and shaping of colonial cities, scholarship which traces the specific role in the spatial development of urban centres played by intermediate groups who do not fit the essentializing categories of colonizer/colonized, is still rare. To investigate this requires crossing the disciplinary fields of urban and migration history and paying attention to traces of transnational and transregional flows of people in the way cities come into being in colonized territories. Land registration archives on specific cities seem to offer a useful entry point to start map the presence of other groups in colonial cities. Yet, what remains silenced in such – often rich – collections, as the very nature of documents they hold almost inevitably brings us to define ‘ownership’ in quite literal – and limiting – terms as the ‘purchase’ of a specific plot of land and property rights? Are there perhaps other ways of defining who ‘owns’ the colonial city, considering that the urban presence of certain groups might have taken different, and sometimes less tangible forms? In other words, what other sources (visual, oral, “memory work”,…) can the urban historian use to get a sense of how “des gens d’ailleurs”, coming from a wide variety of regions and backgrounds, were crucial in the development of colonial cities in 20th century Africa? And what can be the importance of fieldwork observation in this respect? Drawing on the urban history work that has been done in the last two decades at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University on various Congolese cities like Lubumbashi, Kinshasa, Matadi and Mbandaka, as well as some prospective research on German colonial cities in the Great Lakes’ region, we aim at offering a reflection on some possible paths that could be taken.
Negotiations between Owners of Properties and Rental Contracts Affected by the Expropriations, and Public Authorities in 19th-century Paris
Author(s)
Rosa Tamborrino (Politecnico di Torino)
Keywords
Expropriations, Mapping, 19th-century Paris
Abstract
In the Second Empire period (1852-1870), large demolition and reconstructions were executed by the government in Paris. This paper aims to highlight the role of property owners and long term rental contracts as actors in the city exercising their ownerships rights. The surveyed area is located in the historic city center where the changes were well underway (had started) by 1848. The paper is based on fresh sources from my recent on-going research aimed at investigating both the physical and social urban fabric before these changes. Negotiations between owners of properties and rental contracts affected by the expropriations, and public authorities have been overlooked, despite the many studies focusing on the decision makers (such as the prefect Haussmann), but are nonetheless essential for a deep understanding much more than just the disputed valuations. Faced with the expropriations and the new design of plots and blocks in the place of their properties, the owners provided important descriptions to safeguard their rights by including information about the use of the urban space. Furthermore, the claims of inhabitants and owners provide evidence of a strong resistance to the redesign of historic fabric in a period of authoritarianism when no form of opposition was admitted. They reveal also rich architecture and flourishing commerce rather than the poor housing conditions of the official narrative. This approach also allows data to be gathered about people, times of the process, built environment consistency and functions in a temporal framework in which there is a lack of sources due to the destruction by fire of the archives at the time of the Commune. In some few cases it allows for an understanding of some aspects of women’s role in society too. The paper will focus on the area of the creation of rue de Rivoli, which is among the first areas affected by expropriations, and also merge these data with other data coming from different data sources. Faced with the large complex quantity of information as a result, the research entails Digital Humanities methodologies with the result of a strong possibility of visualizing and rethinking the changed urban space. Spatialisation and data representation allow a new large research scale by detailing the information in the lost urban district of a huge area. Collaborative research experienced teaching classes also enabled the production of more visual materials (3D models and video) ‘recreating’ the lost context.
Land Distribution and Construction Activity in Interwar Belgrade
Author(s)
Elvira Ibragimova (Central European University)
Keywords
Urban Planning, Land Distribution, Belgrade
Abstract
After the First World War Belgrade, the capital of the Kingdom of Serbia, became the capital of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The new state had great political ambitions and grandiose projects, leading to significant status and image changes of Belgrade. Under the circumstances, a radical transformation of the city was required; but many projects remained unimplemented. I will show in my presentation how land distribution and conflicts around ownership became an obstacle to urban transformation. The first part presents the results of the cartographic analysis. I have compiled maps of land ownership types (private, municipal, public), which also include information on disputed territories and ownership transfers. I compared these maps with the construction activity maps I composed (showing the presence of buildings on the plot, their purpose according to the master plan, project types for the plot and the number of their alternation, the timing of approvals and directly construction activities). I matched land distribution and construction activity maps in order to investigate how land ownership affected projects selection and alternation, implementation speed, and compliance with the master plan. The most notable result is the conclusion that the speed and the percentage of realization is the least in the case of municipal ownership or disputed territories involving the municipality. In connection with this conclusion, the second part of the presentation bases on case studies of municipal projects. The purpose of this part is to identify strategies, which the municipality used to address the land issue. On the one hand, the municipality had to buy private lands to implement master plan and infrastructure projects. On the other hand, municipality own lands could be expropriated by the state for its needs, which was particularly true taking into account Belgrade's capital status. From this perspective, I will demonstrate how a municipality, clamped between private and public interests, used different strategies and why these strategies have failed.