Contestation over Property Regimes: (Un)doing Private Urban Land Ownership in India and Germany

The sub-project “Contestation over Property Regimes and Housing: (Un)doing Commodified Urban Land Ownership in India and Germany”, which forms part of the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “Structural Change in Property”, examines the legal and everyday forms of challenge to the logic of private property in India and Germany. Michael Schwind and Dr Lisa Vollmer are working on the German case study at the IRS, examining the increasing mobilisation of the law by civil society groups in their challenge to the prevailing private and commodified land ownership regime.

In both case studies, three areas in which the property regime is being challenged are analysed. For Germany, the analyses focus on the disputes (1) surrounding the socialisation of land, (2) concerning land-use and land policy, and (3) regarding the taxation of land and the extraction of socially produced surplus value. The Indian case study, which is being conducted at the University of Erfurt by Varun Patil and Prof. Dr Martin Fuchs, focuses on the debates (1) surrounding the regeneration of slums, (2) concerning land-use planning for middle-class housing, and (3) regarding land management and property development in peri-urban areas.

Methodologically, the study employs a combination of field research, qualitative interviews, publicly available documents and critical discourse analysis. We assume that the radicalisation and questioning of private and commercialised land ownership, on the one hand, and the formulation of alternative forms of ownership, on the other, are not independent phenomena but rather simultaneous and dialectically interlinked ones. Thus, the current alternatives to hegemonic land ownership do not necessarily counteract its reproduction but are, in part, a prerequisite for it.