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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2022

Whose land? The land property regime of in-betweenness in post-soviet urban residential areas in Russia

Résumé

This paper explores urban land property in contemporary Russia. It focuses on the legal property status of land in residential urban areas and its social appropriations. Urban land in Russian cities was widely privatized. As defined in the 2004 Housing code, people who have property titles in the housing blocks from now on are the legal owners of the land their house is located on. Yet, the mapping of this land property is still partially incomplete and not always visible in the official cadastre because of the technical and legal difficulties to register the land for the residents (Inizan & Volkova, forthcoming). Moreover, registration of lands on public cadaster) does not fully prevent the land plots from being seized. This incomplete public cadaster map and its limited role in property regulation, the changing law that widens the justification of land-grabbing by the government characterizes a land property regime of in-betweenness. Property regime doesn't only organize relations between goods and people, but it structures social relations (Canfield, 2020). More specifically, land property organizes relations between people (Blomley, 2016), as it is not only the law that matters in this case but also its negotiations and performance. Unpacking how the land property is registered, used, and bypassed by the different actors of urban development thus enlightens social relations. Based on specific local cases in Moscow and Ekaterinburg, this study aims at understanding how public authorities, developers, and residents negotiate through the appropriation of the law. The study is based on the combination of a macro perspective of the legal regulation on land plots and 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, and specialists on urban development and legal regulations. Through unpacking a few selective cases, our paper shows that this land property regime of in-betweenness turns out to be a purposeful “grey-zoning” of land as a property regime that local oppositions can contest under certain conditions.

Domaines

Géographie
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Dates et versions

halshs-03832769 , version 1 (27-10-2022)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : halshs-03832769 , version 1

Citer

Guénola Inizan, Daria Volkova. Whose land? The land property regime of in-betweenness in post-soviet urban residential areas in Russia. 2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe Conference, Sep 2022, Leipzig, Germany. ⟨halshs-03832769⟩
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