Access to land is at the heart of political-economic debates over urbanization. These debates have traditionally placed the role of capital accumulation and class struggle at the center of how urban land markets are understood (Harvey, 1978; Christophers, 2011). Following recent efforts to expand this capital-centric lens (Fraser, 2014, Glassman, 2006), this session seeks to consider land through the framework of expropriation, a concept that includes (economic) accumulation by dispossession, but also includes forms of dispossession that operate through other forms of domination such as racism and white supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and settler-colonialism. In the contemporary context of land investment and urbanization functioning as primary conduits for financial accumulation, how is exclusion from land carried out, justified, and contested? These two sessions explore policy, the state, and economic development in relation to frontiers of land commodification and expropriation. Theoretically and empirically based papers analyze historical and contemporary practices of, justifications for, and contestations of exclusion, oppression, and expropriation.
Moderator: Lee Polonsky, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Condemnation as a Tool of Economic Development Practice: Lessons from the South Inlet Neighborhood of Atlantic City, New Jersey Evan R. Sweet, AKRF Inc & Columbia University
Mapping Dispossession: Eviction, Foreclosure and the Multiple Geographies of Housing Instability in Lexington, Kentucky Taylor Shelton, Mississippi State University
The “Natures” of Gentrification: Healthism and Creeping Enclosure in Parkdale and the Lower Don, Toronto Jessica Parish, York University
Land Markets as Expropriation: The Market Value Analysis in Philadelphia Lee Polonsky, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey