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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Spatializing a “floating property”: registering land plots in soviet housing blocks in Moscow

Résumé

In this communication, we aim at enriching the study of the spatial dimensions of property by analyzing the process of registering land plots in the cadaster of soviet housing blocks in post-soviet Moscow. In the Soviet Union, urban land plots were the property of the State. Inhabitants of the housing blocks could use the lands if their uses were not preventing others from using them . The housing privatization has changed the legal framework: property of land plots, conceded to inhabitants in 2004, associated the rights of use to property deed. However, this recent land property was not automatically adjusted to each building. To make their property appear on the new cadaster, inhabitants have to officially “register” the land plots. However, this legal procedure is ambiguous: 1) it does not fully prevent the land plots from being seized and 2) it is bureaucratically complicated and, in practice, not available for all the residents. In this paper, we explore how this situation influences the property relations on these land plots and how it’s embedded into spatial arrangements of the neighborhoods. The study is based on the combination of a macro perspective of the legal regulation on land plots and an ethnographic fieldwork on the practice of registering the land. The fieldwork included ethnographic observation, content analysis of mass media publications, and in-depth interviews with residents, specialists on urban development and legal regulations. In this paper, we show 1) the specifics of post-soviet implementation of property rights where inhabitants were left at the margins of the process; 2) that in a context where property remains the structure of urban development, the spatialization of property turns out to be a way to protect associated rights of uses and the difficulty to achieve it is a manifestation of the fragility of property.
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Dates et versions

halshs-03484157 , version 1 (16-12-2021)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-03484157 , version 1

Citer

Guénola Inizan, Daria Volkova. Spatializing a “floating property”: registering land plots in soviet housing blocks in Moscow. Geographies of the law Inquiries into the space-law tangle., Dec 2021, Turin, Italy. ⟨halshs-03484157⟩
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