Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property

The capitalist city is a site for rampant gentrification, socio-spatial stratification, and racial inequality. In Unsettling the City, Nicholas Blomley demonstrates how the legal concept of property helps to generate and underwrite these pervasive urban processes. Showing how conflicting concepts of property are implicated in various power struggles in the contemporary city, Blomley explains how gentrification and colonialism have produced an urban landscape in which neoliberal, nonsocial notions of property clash with a more egalitarian and collective understanding of land. While practices and conceptions of property can be used to dispossess the poor, women, and native peoples, property also emerges as a crucial basis for political claim-making and creative opposition. Unsettling the City is an expansive and original analysis of the spatial politics of urban property that will be of interest to scholars in geography, urban studies, and law. Book jacket.