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How Private Property is being Contested
New Project in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Structural Change of Property”
The relationship to private property has been changing fundamentally for over 40 years - and significant developments can also be observed in issues relating to land and property. A new sub-project of the DFG Collaborative Research Center “Structural Change in Property” (SFB 294) at the IRS is now investigating these in greater depth.
More and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, while at the same time more and more people without wealth are losing access to important goods. Private property has experienced a massive increase in importance since the 1980s, after having been ‘tamed’ by welfare state reforms in the preceding decades. However, the institution of private property is also being challenged by many new developments, including technological ones: Who owns data, who owns wind? Which entities can actually own something? And how is private property being challenged politically? What alternatives are being proposed? The DFG Collaborative Research Centre ‘Structural Change in Property’ (SFB 294), based at the universities of Weimar and Erfurt, has been addressing all these questions since 2021.
At the beginning of the second funding phase of the SFB, a new subproject entitled ‘Contestation over Property Regimes and Housing: (Un)doing Commodified Urban Land Ownership in India and Germany’ has now started at the IRS. Lisa Vollmer and Michael Schwind from the Research Area ‘Politics and Planning’ are working with partners at the University of Erfurt to investigate how private ownership of land is currently being challenged. In their case study on Germany, they look at disputes over private property and exploitation logic, particularly in three political and legal arenas: the question of socialisation (for example, in the form of the Berlin referendum on the expropriation of commercial housing companies), land and spatial policy, and the taxation of land. At the University of Erfurt, comparable developments in India are being researched. However, the focus there is on other case studies: slum redevelopment, land use planning for middle-class housing, and land management and real estate development in the transition zones between urban and rural areas.
The project team aims to understand how the currently dominant regime of private land exploitation interacts with its challenges and possible alternatives. It also considers the possibility that the logic of private property is ultimately unintentionally stabilised and confirmed by those who actually want to repress it.