Book Review: Christophers, B. 2018. The new enclosure: the appropriation of land in neoliberal Britain (original) (raw)
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The new enclosure: the appropriation of public land in neoliberal Britain
Urban Geography, 2019
only a few months before this review, Christophers's The New Enclosure has already garnered praise in The Guardian, The Financial Times, and the London Review of Books; from vaunted academics to grassroots organizations.. For good reason. Its accolades speak to the book's scholarship and timeliness in an under-examined area of research: public land and its privatization in neoliberal Britain. The book not only uncovers, it also critiques the privatization of land for its contradictory, misleading, or otherwise ineffective and deleterious logics (Chapter 3), techniques (Chapter 4), and consequences (Chapter 5). It draws on theoretical elaborations of land and capitalism by combining wide-ranging works of political economy from the likes of George, Harvey, Massey, Marx, Polanyi, and Smith (Chapter 1). It historicizes its project by refreshing readers on how public land in Britain came to befrom the 1066 Norman invasion and establishment of feudal land arrangements, to the string of liberal-capitalist maneuvers that more directly define contemporary issues of public land via eighteenth/nineteenth century enclosures, twentieth-century public ownership, and subsequent post-1979 privatization (Chapter 2). Christophers calculates that public land privatizations since Thatcher amount to roughly 8% of the British landmass, or nearly half of all public land (p. 322), and yet, as the author asks readers to consider in the Introduction: why did I [they] not know this before? (p. 3). His answer, elaborated in various ways throughout the book, and made explicit in the Conclusion, is fourfold: land privatization has been rendered largely invisible through obscure bureaucratic-technocratic policies ("death by a thousand cuts"), misleading schemes like the Right to Buy (a strategy of benumbment), dwindling academic research on landownership (post-Massey), and the checkered legacy of oft anti-democratic public land ownership (TINA?). Knowing more implies being able to do more, like protecting and enhancing remaining public land through political struggle and alternative ownership structures. Seeking to go beyond what has already been said of The New Enclosure elsewhere, I provide three aspects of analysis in this reviewgrounding, making, and moving landas means of suggesting areas of future research urged on by Christophers's stellar analysis of public land and its privatization in Britain. Grounding land: selectivity Christophers is keenly aware of history and nuance yet selects an intentionally limited scope. The book lands on a very specific type of legally constructed land: public land. Land owned by public bodies, both central and local, are of issue, not the Crown Estate or common land that equally make up land's broader landscape in Britain; not buildings or equipment that improve or spoil land; not the public enterprises that extensively own(ed) land like electricity producers, railways, and waterworks; and neither is there any specific consideration of rural-urban distinctions (though council housing is given more direct URBAN GEOGRAPHY
Book review forum: The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain
Dialogues in human geography, 2020
The New Enclosure presents a searing analysis of land privatization in the United Kingdom over the past 30 years. The scope of the privatization that is revealed in the book is staggering, and the analysis of the ideologies which justify it and the technologies/techniques of governance through which these ideologies have been enacted is forensic and powerful. While the book is focused on the relationship between neo-liberalism and land privatization (indeed, it makes the case that ‘privatization in general, and land privatization in particular, is fundamental to neoliberalism’ (p. 15)), it traces the particular ways in which this relationship has developed in Britain. Rather than suggesting that this experience is universal or even paradigmatic, Christophers offers a productive encounter between critical geographic theory and close empirical investigation of a particular geographical context. It thereby invites those of us concerned with other places to consider the extent to which ...
Change in the political economy of land value capture in England
Town Planning Review
Variations in the character, performance and impact of policies and practices to capture land value for the community are usually examined by analysing experience in different countries. Such international comparative research is cross-sectional and does not cover the evolving relations between systems of land value capture and the economies, polities and societies within which they are set. The paper examines the relations in England between the extant political economy and supporting ideologies, and the distinctive forms of land value capture that they produced. It traces the shift from a top-down, strategic approach in an era of corporatist government before 1979 to the subsequent extension and consolidation of bottom-up practice set within the context of neoliberalism. The analysis highlights the evolution of the idea of land value capture and the policies and practices associated with it, especially the contestation that informed such changes.
The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom
There exists an influential and growing political-economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of trad-able property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.
The new enclosure: how land commissions can lead the fight against urban land-grabs
The Conversation, 2021
When Boris Johnson sold the 35-acre Royal Albert Docks in London to Chinese buyers in 2013, it was his biggest commercial property deal as mayor of London and one of China’s largest investments in the UK. The Greater London Authority sold off further parcels of land in the area in a bid to regenerate the Royal Docks, which had fallen into disrepair with the decline of the docklands from the 1960s. Over the past few decades, huge transfers of land from public to private ownership have occurred throughout Britain. Since Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, one-tenth of the entire British landmass, or about half of the land owned by all public bodies, has been privatised. This has included, for instance, dozens of former military bases on Ministry of Defence land. In our cities, one result of this land privatisation has been the long-term shift from public to private housing tenure: social rented housing declined from 31% of Britain’s total housing stock in 1981 to just 18% in 2012
The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals
The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2012
The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.
Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, 2019
, ahead of the debate on the new Land Reform Bill, a group of Our Land campaigners gathered on the steps of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Their message to the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) was clear and concise: 'Be Brave'. Over the past few years, members of the Our Land campaign and of more formal organisations such as Community Land Scotland, which, since its inception in 2010, has been committed to promoting community land purchase and supporting land reform, have repeatedly urged the Scottish government to take strong action and break with the land ownership system that has barely been reformed since the mid-sixteenth century and that has 432 landowners (comprising Scottish lairds, 'sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates') account for half of all Scotland's privately owned land. 1 There are few issues as fundamental and volatile as that of land ownership and open access, particularly when set against the backdrop of Scotland's recent political and cultural re-examination, be it before or after the Scottish independence referendum. An exercise in participatory democracy, the issue has been on the agenda for over two decades. Scotland has seen increasingly pressing demands for a fairer redistribution of land, a remarkable increase in community buyouts since the 2003 Land Reform Act, and the commercial success and widespread media coverage of publications such as Andy Wightman's