Contested Property Claims

Maja Hojer Bruun is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her work in the Contested Property Claims research group focuses on urban commons and how ownership is practiced in everyday life through relations of care, stewardship, belonging, and identification. Patrick J. L. Cockburn is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Denmark, and post-doctoral researcher with the Contested Property Claims research group (funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Council for Independent Research). He works on the political philosophy of economic practices and institutions and is the author of the forthcoming book The Politics of Dependence: Economic Parasites and Vulnerable Lives (Palgrave Macmillan). Bjarke Skærlund Risager is a PhD Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, Denmark. Part of the Contested Property Claims research group, he writes about social movements and activism from an interdisciplinary perspective. His research has been published in Globalizations, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Interface: A Journal For and About Social Movements, and elsewhere; it can be followed on au.academia.edu/BjarkeRisager. Mikkel Thorup is Professor with Special Responsibilities at the section for intellectual history at the Institute of Culture and Society, University of Aarhus, Denmark. His main interests concern the history of political and economic thought, and he directed the research project of Contested Property Claims behind this book. Recent books include Pro Bono? (Zero Books 2014), The Total Enemy (Wipf & Stock 2015), and the edited volume Intellectual History of Economic Normativities (Palgrave, 2016).

List of contributors

Preface

Foreword: how property matters

NICHOLAS BLOMLEY

Introduction: disagreement as a window onto property

PATRICK J. L. COCKBURN, MAJA HOJER BRUUN, BJARKE SKÆRLUND RISAGER, AND MIKKEL THORUP

PART 1

Squatting and eviction

1 The right to the city and its limits: contested property claims, urban exceptionality, and the fight for relational space in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014

NEIL GRAY AND LIBBY PORTER

2 Possession through dispossession: in quest of property and social mobility in urban Brazil

MARIE KOLLING

3 The politics of legal technicalities: an inquiry into the demolition of a Roma EU-migrant settlement in Malmö, Sweden

MARIA PERSDOTTER

4 Urban emptiness, ghost owners and squatters’ challenges to private property

MIGUEL A. MARTÍNEZ

Intermezzos

5 Landed (Freeman’s Wood): an exploration of landownership through contemporary art

JOHN ANGUS AND STOREY G2

6 In the time of Trump: housing, whiteness, and abolition

MANISSA M. MAHARAWAL AND ERIN MCELROY

PART 2

Land rights and conflicting laws

7 The work of ownership: shaping contestation in Ontario’s aggregate extraction disputes

ESTAIR VAN WAGNER

8 Climate adaptation on the Australian east coast

TAYANAH O’DONNELL

9 Property as a technique of jurisdiction: traplines and tenure

SHIRI PASTERNAK

10 Decolonizing neoliberalism? First Nations reserves, private property rights, and the legislation of Indigenous dispossession in Canada

MICHAEL FABRIS (KREBS)

11 Contesting claims to gardens and land: gendered practice in post-war northern Uganda

JULAINA A. OBIKA, BEN ADOL OTTO, SULAYMAN MPISI BABIIHA, AND MICHAEL WHYTE

Afterword: prophecies on property’s probability: climate change and smart contracts in the Anthropocene

BILL MAURER

Index