Contested Property Claims

What Disagreement Tells Us About Ownership

Maja Hojer Bruun, Patrick Joseph Cockburn, Bjarke Skærlund Risager, Mikkel Thorup, Maja Hojer Bruun, Patrick Joseph Cockburn, Bjarke Skærlund Risager, Mikkel Thorup

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351362092
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Derecho
• Categoría: Teoría y práctica del derecho

Property relations are such a common feature of social life that the complexity of the web of laws, practices, and ideas that allow a property regime to function smoothly are often forgotten. But we are quickly reminded of this complexity when conflict over property erupts. When social actors confront a property regime – for example by squatting – they enact what can be called 'contested property claims'. As this book demonstrates, these confrontations raise crucial issues of social justice and show the ways in which property conflicts often reflect wider social conflicts. Through a series of case studies from across the globe, this multidisciplinary anthology brings together works from anthropologists, legal scholars, and geographers, who show how exploring contested property claims offers a privileged window onto how property regimes function, as well as an illustration of the many ways that the institution of property shapes power relationships today.

Part I

Squatting and eviction

Chapter 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

This chapter takes up a critical discussion of the celebrated ‘right to the city’ thesis to examine the significant constraints that can emerge from a rights-based approach. The chapter explores a property conflict ignited by the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games and its related urban renewal projects, in which the state used a Compulsory Purchase Order, a kind of emergency measure for property, to evict one family. Alongside a critical stance on the political implications and possibilities of invoking the right to the city, the chapter seeks to go beyond rights and recognition claims by combining a relational view of property and space with an empirical narration of one family’s struggle to keep their property while confronting a state determined to evict them.

Introduction

In this paper we scrutinise the limits of the celebrated ‘Right to the City’ (RttC) concept by way of a vigorously contested compulsory purchase order (CPO) on the site of the athletes’ Games Village for Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014 (CWGs 2014). We chart the dramatic story of how the Jaconelli family challenged displacement and inadequate compensation claims; the vagaries of the judicial process, and ultimately the sanctioned state violence of CPO procedures – a process of contestation that involved six years of ‘staying put’ (cf. Hartman et al., 1982) in a rundown, abandoned housing estate while facing the full brunt of local state and media defamation. Dalmarnock on the River Clyde, the site where the eviction took place, has now undergone a transformation from a working-class residential community of primarily social housing to an athletes’ Games village, to a mixed-tenure housing ‘village’ construed as a central plank of the Games housing ‘legacy’. This process has significantly shifted the tenure composition of the area from social to private.

Charting the mechanisms of this process and, crucially, the disagreements over its realisation, we question the very basis of rights claims per se. In particular, as scholar-activists, we make a critical intervention into debates over the celebrated RttC thesis, which has become inspirational for urban struggles worldwide. The thesis very usefully promotes a specifically urban or spatial politics which we strongly support, yet the concept and everyday application of rights is subject to three significant constraints that leave it vulnerable to critique as a practical mode of urban contestation. First, the notion of rights often remains too chimerical for practical use; second, the notion of citizenship, from which active rights are derived, is neither universal nor absolute; third, the use of state exceptionality, of which CPOs are an exemplary tool, means individual rights are easily usurped by threatened, implied or actual state violence.

Over and above a critique of rights discourse, we also focus on forms of contestation that might circumvent co-option into individual ‘possessory’ rights by going beyond ‘absolute’ conceptions of property (Porter, 2014). Such possessory and absolute conceptions view the spaces of properties as objective, bounded, technical and asocial, thus masking the politics of property’s spatiality and its foundation in political economy. Following Massey (2005), we challenge readings that assume absolute notions of property, working towards a more ‘relational’ conception of property that views the spaces of property as the product of social interrelations and as themselves generative of space (cf. Blomley, 2014a; Keenan, 2010). This characterisation provides an intensely social, and thus more political, conception of space with which to apprehend struggles against displacement and state exceptionality. The deepening politicisation of the Jaconelli family over time, the main subjects of our case study, charts a tendential shift from an absolute to a relational conception of property (even if an absolute conception remained a practical necessity). Such a shift questions assumptions underlying individual property claims while suggesting how a politics of space, and of housing in particular, might be construed and conducted in an era that has seen a marked privatisation of housing in the UK and elsewhere.

Our argument proceeds by laying out the policy and planning context for the CWGs 2014, shifting modalities of property ownership in Glasgow, a narrative description of our CPO case study and an account of the scholar-activist methodology that has informed this chapter. We then present our three-fold critique of rights discourse and practice before illustrating, through our case study, the limits of rights talk in urban contestation and what disagreement tells us about ownership when it is configured as relative and not absolute. Finally, we argue for forms of spatial activism and critique beyond rights and possessory politics through a notion of relational rather than absolute space.

The grounds of contestation

In 2008, the Dalmarnock neighbourhood in the East End of Glasgow was chosen as the main site for the CWGs 2014 Athletes’ Village and primary sporting arenas. Like other urban areas targeted for mega-events and associated regeneration, Dalmarnock has long been subject to de-industrialisation, disinvestment and territorial stigmatisation (Gray & Mooney, 2011; Gray & Porter, 2015). Until the 1970s, it was a relatively thriving and populated area, comprising classic Glaswegian red-sandstone tenement flats with a significant proportion of public housing. However, through the 1970s and 1980s, planning blight and disinvestment accelerated, with resident displacement gathering pace in the 1990s before the land was transferred to Glasgow City Council (GCC) for ‘area-based regeneration’. By the mid-2000s, the area had become largely derelict, characterised by under-maintained (though structurally sound) tenement buildings, abandoned shops and large areas of vacant land following phased demolition. Dalmarnock was thus an exemplary candidate for urban property development: a large-scale mega-event to catalyse investment, huge areas of derelict land with little current but much potential market value, a riverside setting and close proximity to the city centre and a seemingly fragmented, impoverished and stigmatised population lacking resources for neighbourhood resistance.

While most residents had been decanted from Dalmarnock by 2008, the Jaconelli family remained in their home, surrounded by advancing dereliction. Unlike most of their neighbours who socially rented, the Jaconelli family owned their small flat and were not eligible for relocation into social housing nearby (Porter et al., 2009). The case study, then, illuminates a wider problem in the UK where individual private property owners in predominantly social housing estates are excluded from the general maintenance and relocation rights procedures that social housing agencies are obliged to comply with. Caught in a vortex of falling property prices, urban abandonment and a ratcheting up of Games-related hype, the Jaconelli family prepared to defend their home, with extremely limited resources, against the juggernaut of Games-led urban regeneration.

Rejecting top-down narratives of positive urban transformation, the Jaconelli family refused desultory compensation offers and campaigned loudly about a lack of consultation and the destruction of a neighbourhood. Their objections to the CPO were heard but lost at a public hearing in 2009. Fighting eviction notices, the Jaconelli family signed up a prominent local housing rights lawyer to represent their case. When further legal appeals failed, they took the decision to barricade themselves into their home in protest, attracting intense media interest and the support of dozens of local people, students, activists and members of the Glasgow Games Monitor 2014 (GGM 2014), which the authors co-founded.¹ After six years alone on a derelict site without services, they were violently evicted in March 2011 and waited a further two years for compensation. Another claim at the European Court of Human Rights, finally considered in 2015, was ultimately unsuccessful.

With specific reference to the themes of disagreement and contested property claims, we draw here on our extensive experience in local campaigns around the CWGs 2014. Our involvement with GGM 2014 began in late 2008, seeking to provide accessible critical information on the Games and a basis for direct action solidarity. Our engagement involved: legal assistance, eviction support, direct action, media activity, blogging, extensive primary and secondary literature research and dissemination, leading public walks and numerous events, the production of our own photographic and documentary archives and interviews with those affected (Gray & Porter, 2015; Porter et al., 2009; http://gamesmonitor2014.org). Before discussing this situated engagement in relation to our case study, we review the limits of rights discourse as we see it.

Beyond false premises and promises: the limits of rights discourse

The Right to the City (RttC) slogan has become something of a clarion call in critical urban geography since its formulation by Henri Lefebvre in 1968 (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]; Mitchell, 2003; Purcell, 2002; Harvey, 2008, 2012; Mayer, 2009; Attoh, 2011; Merrifield, 2011, 2013). It is ‘an immediately understandable and intuitively compelling slogan’ (Marcuse, 2009, p. 189) that has helped establish urbanisation in political consciousness, just as Lefebvre intended. But here we probe some of the limits underlying the ‘cry and demand’ for the right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968], p. 158) as a call for practical political action. Through a three-fold critique of rights discourse we scrutinise the RttC slogan as ‘empty signifier’, the universal notion of rights-bearing citizenship and the sovereign power of exceptional decision making. Underpinning this survey is an understanding that rights claims cannot simply proceed from the premises of political economy. Political economy does not question the foundational basis of private property – which is the material summary expression of alienated labour – but ‘takes for granted what it is supposed to explain’ (Marx, 1977 [1844], pp. 61–62). It expresses the material processes through which private property passes after the fact – including its languages, laws and rights – rather than explaining how these formulas ‘arise from the very nature of private property’ (ibid p. 61). For us, rights claims tend to forestall radical urban struggle because they tacitly accept absolute conceptions of space that presuppose a positivist, asocial view of private property. Probing the way rights claims operate in urban struggles more closely, then, allows us to uncover the power-laden relationship between property, economics and law and to consider how this nexus might be disrupted and potentially overcome.

The Right to the City as empty signifier

As Attoh (2011, p. 674) observes, Lefebvre’s definition of rights in The Right to the City was ‘sketchy at best’, raising basic questions over how rights are defined, whose rights are being identified and for whose benefit. While the capaciousness of the RttC term may lend itself to urban solidarity and a certain urban political consciousness, ultimately such ‘strategic fuzziness’ tends to obscure complex and highly particular socio-economic contradictions (ibid, p. 679). To clarify, we are not suggesting that Lefebvre was a willing proponent of liberal human rights. In many other works, including The Sociology of Marx, also published in 1968, Lefebvre expresses an unequivocal Marxist critique of such rights. Yet in The Right to the City he is much more ambiguous around this question. What concerns us here is the moderating influence of how the RttC slogan is sometimes taken up today, obscuring a deeper critical scrutiny of the viability of contemporary rights claims.

For Harvey (2008), one of Lefebvre’s chief supporters, the RttC term has too often become an ‘empty signifier’ or mere ‘chimera’ due to the abstraction of its terms (Harvey, 2012, pp. xv–xvi), an opacity which has often left cognate urban literature and practice theoretically and politically underdeveloped (Purcell, 2002). Since the ‘rights agenda’ is so indeterminate, Merrifield (2013, p. 119) argues, it tends to stir ‘the bleeding hearts’ of liberals and reactionaries as much as those of pro-revolutionaries. Indeed, it is now a basic banality to say that the slogan has long been recuperated by multiple state agencies and NGOs for purposes that deviate strikingly from Lefebvre’s radical intentions (Mayer, 2009; De Souza, 2010). Even the celebrated codification of the RttC into law, as has occurred in the case of Brazil’s City Statute, does not finalise the protection of poor citizens. As Kolling (this volume) demonstrates, the RttC in this case is conflated, contra Lefebvre, with an ideology of bounded homeownership. Moreover, the promise of social housing under this codification has led some movements to risk attaining ‘possession through dispossession’ (by deliberately locating squatter settlements in certain places targeted for eviction so that resettlement might be initiated). Yet the state did not finalise the administrative procedures of issuing formal property title documentation, thus perpetuating precarity and rightslessness. In such ways, Lefebvre’s conception suffers from dissipation and domestication: the ‘social force’ that Lefebvre posited as a ‘necessary (but not sufficient)’ condition for a new urban life (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968], p. 156) is now routinely eclipsed by institutional and reformist measures and the pseudo-participatory mechanisms of state mediation (De Souza, 2010).

There is of course a long tradition of criticism towards rights under the banner of citizenship. Marx (1844) observed how the second French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (1793) was only a declaration of rights for ‘man’ in the singular; the liberty of man as an isolated monad (see also Agamben, 1998; Ranciere, 2010). This right of self-interest, Marx argued, reflected an abstracted view of citizens under the universal equivalence of exchange, an abstraction from real differences in wealth, privilege, power, occupation and kinship. Ultimately, he observes in Capital Vol. 1 (1990, p. 344), the question of rights is not guaranteed by civic membership but rather by a relation of power: ‘Between equal rights force decides’.

Yet it is difficult to abandon rights entirely. Within socio-legal theory, there has been much debate between those who see rights as abstract, disempowering and obfuscatory and those who see them as a potentially empowering and necessary feature of emancipatory struggles (Herman, 1993). Schematically, for the latter camp, rights are viewed as an important bulwark against attacks on current living conditions and a progressive ‘ideal’ against which the behaviour of powerful actors can be measured (Brown, 1995; Mitchell, 2003). They provide a political yardstick that allows power relations, previously understood as ‘common sense’, to be reframed as inherently political and conditional (Blomley & Pratt, 2001, p. 152). They provide a vocabulary for ‘naming, blaming and shaming’ (Felstine, Abel, & Sarat, 1980, p. 631), and their abstraction and instability might paradoxically offer the potential for resignification by those not included in their alleged universality (Brown, 1995). Indeed, the critique of rights has often been seen as a white privilege denied to racialised subjects excluded from political membership and civic belonging (Williams, 1991). Yet for those predominantly situated in the former camp, such positions, however morally compelling, may inadvertently assume and obscure what must be critiqued, thus yoking the question of freedom through rights to the very institutions producing inequality and exclusion (see Tushnet, 1984; Fudge & Glasbeek, 1992; Brown, 1995).

The myth of the universal citizen

Once we examine the acquisition of rights more closely we see that the erasure of certain kinds of bodies is structured into the very mode...