Land commons for inclusive cities ; Communs fonciers pour des villes inclusives ; Land commons for inclusive cities: Producing and securing popular housing around shared ownership of land: a diversity of models, their interests and their limits ; Communs fonciers pour des villes inclusives: Produire et sécuriser l'habitat populaire autour de la propriété partagée du sol : une diversité de modèles, leurs intérêts et leurs limites

Open Access

Abstract

National audience ; While the notion of "commons" has been the subject of a remarkable resurgence of interest in the academic, operational and political world over the last ten years, little work has been done on the cities of the Global South and the precise question of land for housing. Yet access to urban land for the inhabitants of these rapidly growing cities is a major issue, a determining factor in improving daily living conditions and providing access to "adequate housing", in the UN terminology. The dominant approach to urban land tenure, oriented towards individual ownership and the free market, generates speculative tendencies, land financialization and exclusion of the most precarious households. The critical force of the notion of commons opens up innovative ways to produce housing in the Global South, according to plural perspectives that are attentive to the needs and power to act of the inhabitants. This report presents the results of the research program "Communs fonciers pour l'habitat dans les Suds" (land-based commons for housing in the Global South), led by the UMR Géographie-cités and conducted in collaboration with researchers in the fields studied. The program received funding from the French Development Agency (AFD) from 2017 to 2020, and is part of the AFD's reflections on the link between commons and development.The research team have conducted eight case studies, representing three types of arrangements: (i) collective production of housing, such as cooperatives of usufructuary inhabitants in Uruguay, housing cooperatives in Burkina Faso, and a Community Land Trust in Kenya; (ii) socio-legal processes of collective reclamation of land rights (commoning), in particular, collective mobilizations to regularize individual land rights in Bangalore and Nagpur in India and collective acquisitive prescription in Brazil (iii) real estate development projects on collectively held land, such as developments on Kanak customary land in New Caledonia and on ejidal land in Mexico. Each case study is ...