Dear all,
Please join our session for TU Darmstadt International Conference on Cities and Change "Three Decades of Post-Socialist Transition" May 17-18, 2019:
"New Patterns of Land Appropriation in Post-Socialist Space"
Session Chairs: Daniela Zupan and Vera Smirnova, Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
Since the advent of neoliberal transition, post-socialist space became a disputed territory where new landed oligarchy, foreign interests, old capital and citizens aligned together either to allow or to resist patterns of land appropriation. Recent decades of economic and political crises have witnessed new waves of urban and rural land acquisitions, with new land codes emerging and the opening-up of land reserves to local and foreign investors. One feature, however, remains familiar – common people are still deprived of their land, now in the hands of the few.
Land is foremost a political category, it is a finite resource that can be appropriated, distributed, and owned. Throughout the history of civil society, acquisition of land has been associated with accumulation of power. In Russia, for example, land appropriation is shaped by multiple historical forces and legacies of collective land ownership and fictitious private property, centralized state oppression and the autonomy of the people. Against this background we see the post-socialist space as a unique avenue to contest predominant theoretical assumptions about the triad of land, capital, and power. The proposed session aims to put a start to this scholarly task.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• Land acquisitions and urban property relations;
• Urban land and real-estate financialization and speculation;
• Displacement, evictions, and dispossessions;
• Land grabbing and agrarian change.
If you are interested, please send your proposed abstract of 300 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by November 5.
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