The Politics of Land and Value: Negotiating Social Futures

This book investigates the treatment of land as a source of money in global urban processes. Probing land development at moments of value creation, capture, negotiation, contestation, and transformation, it sheds light on how and why value practices matter in transforming the politics of the status quo so that the social life of land may thrive.

This book approaches value as a mode of practice to investigate how the deepening treatment of land as a source of municipal revenue and private profit has become a hegemonic project that penetrates and shapes key aspects of how we run cities and live our urban life. Closely related is a set of issues that greatly concern urban scholars, municipal planners, and community organizers around the world: the use and politics of land value capture (LVC); the role of the state in land taking and assemblage; mechanisms of land development tools and their impacts; public-private power relations; the conceptualization, production, negotiation, and distribution of costs and benefits; fiscal policy; and community mobilization and political contestation. Nine global case studies offer insights into the centrality of land development as a source of money, the narrowing of how land is valued, the resulting problematic outcomes of market capture of land value, the politics of the status quo, and community experimentations with counter and alternative practices. A value framework serves as a heuristic to help probe the politics of land development more deeply at different moments of practice: value creation, value capture, value negotiation, value contestation, and value transformation. Bringing the case studies into a useful juxtaposition, the value framework also outlines how to engage practices to generate a transformative politics of land under which competing value logics and the social life of land may thrive.

This book is particularly useful for urban scholars, municipal planners, community organizers, educators, and students in fields related to urban planning and geography and those who are interested in issues around LVC, land development tools, urban redevelopment, public-private negotiation, urban political economic analysis, community mobilization, alternative urbanism, equity, and justice.

Mi Shih is an Associate Professor and Program Director in the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Her research is centered on the intersection of the politics of land development, the state’s engagement in financial and regulatory techniques of governance, democratic participation, and urban spatial-economic transformation. She employs a mixed methods approach. Her recent research focuses on how various urban land development instruments, such as land readjustment, air rights tools, and density bonusing, enable the state to expand the private real estate property market while simultaneously deepening its governance in several key areas, such as social housing provision and experimentation, infrastructure repair and building, and the legitimization of the developmental agenda in Taiwan.

Kathe Newman is a Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program and Director of the Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Dr. Newman’s research has explored affordable housing and housing insecurity, processes of financialization, land development, governance, gentrification, foreclosure, urban redevelopment, food security, and community participation. Dr. Newman has published articles in Urban Studies, Cityscape, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Affairs Review, Shelterforce, Progress in Human Geography, Urban Geography, Housing Studies, GeoJournal, and Environment and Planning A. She is an associate editor at Environment and Planning A and the co-book review editor for the Journal of Urban Affairs.