New research avenues on urban expansion and land commodification in the Global South: Housing, capitalisation, agricultural changes
B. Bon, C. Simonneau, E. Denis, Ph. Lavigne-Delville
This article considers the ways in which land uses are changing in the global South linked to urbanisation. Land commodification has become a fundamental driving force of urban expansion and economic growth but much of the data do not capture the diverse processes at work. Asia, Africa and Latin America jointly accumulated 128,000 km2 of urbanised land between 2000 and 2015, accounting for 73% of all changes in land use around the world during this period. Urban sprawl is increasing at the fastest rate on the African continent, where built-up areas have almost doubled since 1990, and at the slowest rate in Europe (Pumain, 2020). In this paper, the term “land-use conversion” refers to the transformation of cultivated or natural spaces into land that is destined for economic purposes other than agricultural activities, such as property development, self-builds, hoarding or speculation. The different stages of the conversion process are considered: changes in ownership, acquisition of land rights, land transactions, plot divisions, productive use through construction and property development (housing estates, building projects of various sizes, etc.), and raw land (demarcated parcels that remain undeveloped). These changes are taking place on different types of land, from cultivated fields to common areas and environmentally sensitive spaces. The sequencing of the stages and the actors involved in land conversions vary according to the context in which they occur. Large-scale land conversions generated by major development and infrastructure projects, industrial and extractive activities, and large-scale land grabs in rural areas have been widely examined over the past decade. Much of the analysis in recent years has been informed by pervasive neoliberal policies and the spectacular growth of international financial flows in urban production (Aveline-Dubach et al., 2020). Rural research still tends to focus on land tenure rather than property investment, although some studies on rural land appropriation in the global South have started investigating the connections between urbanisation and land commodification and speculation. But these land dynamics are still examined through the prism of 'land grabbing' and the dominant role played by transnational and government actors. There have been recent calls to sharpen the focus on urban demand and the endogenous logics driving diffuse acquisitions of small, more fragmented parcels, which are less visible than large-scale property development and infrastructure projects (Steel et al., 2019).
Event: World Bank Land Conference 2024 - Washington
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