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ABOUT THE SEMINAR SERIES

The Seminar Series Negotiating Social Futures: The Politics of Land Development and Value Capture During and After the COVID-19 Pandemic has come into focus during our engagement and conversation with an interdisciplinary group of researchers, community activists, and planners about issues and practices related to the role of land as a reservoir of value to be extracted for social provision. Three sets of questions are especially of our concern and inquiry.

  1. How does value capture work? Does COVID-19 re-embed value in land development with social futures? We will also examine whether, and, if so, how, COVID-19 disrupts or restructures present land development discourses and practices. COVID-19 exposes marginalization and inequality in poor housing conditions for migrants and low-income neighborhoods, private design of public space, and anti-poor and profit-driven treatments of informal settlements. This raises questions about how to capture value differently such that it is re-embedded with the social. How does on-going social resistance to commodification and value capture, such as squatting and occupy movements, community land trust, etc., join forces with new reckonings around social inequalities in land?
  2. How should the politics of land development and the city’s social futures be aligned? The outcomes of value capture are never predetermined and instead are molded through the public-private dynamics. The proposed conference and workshop will foreground practices of value capture as a means toward possible social futures in the politics of land development.
  3. where is the place of the public in defining, negotiating, and anchoring captured value? Value capture techniques assume that gains and losses are additive and commensurable and only capture those that are material and measurable. The technocratic-oriented regime feeds well into the developmentalist, top-down urban entrepreneurialism, a prevalent mode of urban transformation especially in the Global South. It also often obscures global capitalism, power concentration, market rationality, and individualistic legality that are at the center of urban land commodification. In addition, whatever benefits that are available and open to public negotiation are only those compatible with the capitalist land market and development deals. The monetization of value therefore can easily foreclose non-monetary or social constructions of value by communities, leading to private appropriation of publicly produced value. It is therefore crucial to ask who decides, through what process, for whose value, at whose cost, and to what end. Workshop participants will examine the conditions under which the public thrives or stagnates in value capture.

This project is supported by an Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award grant (USF-SSA-210213) and hosted by Dr. Mi Shih and Dr. Kathe Newman.

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Through the following three events, we will explore, unravel, and advance the theory and practice of land value capture.

Virtual Paper Conference – September 23-24, 2021

The two-day public virtual paper conference includes three paper panels with discussants, a keynote address by Professor Emeritus Robert W. Lake, co-author of Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (2021, Cornell University Press) and early career scholar training. The conference will attract a global audience of activists, students, and scholars who focus on questions related to land, development, social policy, participatory democracy and land value capture policies.  The conference will include a publishing panel that engages journal and book editors and early career scholars in conversation about the publishing process.

Pre-Conference Case Study Mini-Workshop – January 2022

The virtual half-day case study mini-workshop will take place in January 2022. This event serves two purposes. First, it ensures that the group is conceptualizing the organization, format, and depth of case study content similarly and engages the group in working together to create a rich set of case studies. Second, it provides case study training for early career scholars. The participants will include the case study authors and interested early career scholars participating in the seminar. The audience for the cases includes undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and practitioners. The event will launch with a talk by Karen O’Neill, an associate professor of Human Ecology at Rutgers University, a specialist in case study research. Professor Mi Shih will present her case study about the Treasure Hill squatter settlement in Taiwan as an illustrative case study example. Participants will spend the remaining hour brainstorming ideas and addressing questions.

In-person Case Study Conference – September 22-23, 2022

The in-person day and a half empirical case study conference will take place in mid-September 2022 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This conference is organized as a set of three panels with case study presentations and ample time for conversation. The audience for the in-person conference will include students, faculty, and activists from the New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania tri-state region. The conference will be widely advertised through the Bloustein School and Rutgers University and personal networks to reach faculty and students and surrounding colleges and universities and practitioner networks.