School of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School

Ownership structures and governance arrangements (i.e. social institutions) have significant affects on the form, cost and nature of service provision and the benefits derived from [owning] property, as well as the experience of place and social relations within neighbourhoods and between ‘owners’ and ‘users’. Such common interest and interest in common sit uncomfortably with legal distributions of property rights (Krier, 2008).

In a time of economic recession, public spending cuts, and increasing demands on the third sector from politicians, there has been a series of calls for communities to take ‘ownership’ of their areas. This raises questions about whether new commoning is exploitative, and whether and how communities calculate the costs and benefits of becoming property owners instead of ‘merely’ enjoying the benefits of assets.

The current UK Government, in power since 2010, has claimed to be pursuing a policy of localist empowerment by introducing a series of new ‘Community Rights’ effected through the Localism Act (2011). The paper examines one of the new rights’; the Community Right to Bid (CRtB), exploring the nexus between legal and social relations of property rights, community action and values and the ramifications of this localist policy tool. The CRtB mechanism encourages communities to bid to register an Asset of Community Value (AoCV), which allows them to bid to buy the AoCV on the open market when it becomes available.

This approach maintains legal ownership and ‘private’ property virtually intact and if social groups want to secure an asset, is this mechanism progressive? How CRtB contributes to the socio-economic resilience of communities is critically explored by examining the context, motivations, attitudes and process associated with CRtB.  It is contended that in order to protect AOCV and the social relations of communities that are critically dependent on the existence of the (social) asset, communities are being required to practice a form of enclosure, through formal legislative means, in order to protect valued assets. This wave of ‘new commoning’, which on the surface challenges the logic of market mechanisms, has been viewed by some as a claim to rights to the city; as collective rights “to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2013: 1) may also be seen as a neo-liberalisation and marketisation of social relations of property and as a last option if community assets and their ‘lived worlds’ are otherwise to be lost entirely.

CRtB may be read as part of a technology of governance practiced by successive UK government’s to ‘govern through community’ (Rose, 1999). This also highlights what kind of property relations should policymakers prefer? (Davy, 2012: 145-6) and should communities demand.


Key words: Localism, Community, ownership, governance, property rights

Bibliography
Davy, B. (2012) Land Policy: Planning and the Spatial Consequences of Property. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Harvey, D. (2013) Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso Books.
Krier, R. (2008) The evolution of property rights: a synthetic overview. University of Michigan Law School working paper series, No. 91
Rose, N. (1999) Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

This thesis discusses ownership as a governance issue and contributes to conceptualisations of property as an expression of wider social relations and vice versa i.e. how property impacts on social relations. This is pertinent given the advent of renewed attention to the (new)commons as a set of practices and is intrinsically linked issues of how rights are constituted, defended and challenged. Indeed, the collective right claims made via the Community Right to Bid (CRtBid) policy and Assets of Community Value (AsCV) mechanisms explored in the research do resemble discourses associated with the (new)commons and right to the city movements. Central to conceptualising property is consideration of claims to property that are often derived from conflicting value systems, which unsettle property in use and exchange from ‘owners,’ users and other third parties’ perspectives. This research describes how competing claims are reflected in stakeholder behaviours and motives, as well as in the...