scholarly journals Fee Simple Failures: Rural Landscapes and Race

2021 ◽  
pp. 1695
Author(s):  
Jessica Shoemaker
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Property Law ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Rural Places

Property law’s roots are rural. America pursued an early agrarian vision that understood real property rights as instrumental to achieving a country of free, engaged citizens who cared for their communities and stewarded their physical place in it. But we have drifted far from this ideal. Today, American agriculture is industrialized, and rural communities are in decline. The fee simple ownership form has failed every agrarian objective but one: the maintenance of white landownership. For it was also embedded in the original American experiment that land ownership would be racialized for the benefit of its white citizens, through acts of colonialism, slavery, and explicit race-based exclusion in property law. Today, rather than undoing this racialized legacy, modern property rules only further concentrate and homogenize rural landownership. Agricultural landownership remains almost entirely— 98 percent—white. This is a critical racial justice issue that converges directly with our impending environmental crisis and the decline of rural communities more generally. This Article builds on work of rural sociologists and farm advocates who demonstrate, again and again, that despite a pervasive narrative of rural places dying for want of population and agricultural systems too far gone for reform, the reality is a crowd of emerging farmers—and farmers of color in particular— clamoring for access. Existing policy efforts to support beginning farmers have focused primarily on supporting a few private land transactions within existing systems. This Article brings property theory to the table for the first time, arguing that property law itself is not only responsible for the original racialized distributions of agricultural land but also actively perpetuates both ongoing racialized disparities and the currently industrialized and depopulated rural landscape. This Article deconstructs our most fundamental land-tenure choice—the fee simple itself—and calls on our collective legal imagination to develop more adaptive, inclusive, and dynamic land-tenure designs rooted in these otherwise overlooked rural places.

scholarly journals Identification of Linear Vegetation Elements in a Rural Landscape Using LiDAR Point Clouds

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Lucas ◽  
Willem Bouten ◽  
Zsófia Koma ◽  
W. Kissling ◽  
Arie Seijmonsbergen
Keyword(s):  
Regional Planning ◽  
Point Cloud ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
3D Structure ◽  
Point Clouds ◽  
Bare Soil ◽  
Agricultural Landscapes ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Conservation Strategies ◽  
Rural Landscapes

Modernization of agricultural land use across Europe is responsible for a substantial decline of linear vegetation elements such as tree lines, hedgerows, riparian vegetation, and green lanes. These linear objects have an important function for biodiversity, e.g., as ecological corridors and local habitats for many animal and plant species. Knowledge on their spatial distribution is therefore essential to support conservation strategies and regional planning in rural landscapes but detailed inventories of such linear objects are often lacking. Here, we propose a method to detect linear vegetation elements in agricultural landscapes using classification and segmentation of high-resolution Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point data. To quantify the 3D structure of vegetation, we applied point cloud analysis to identify point-based and neighborhood-based features. As a preprocessing step, we removed planar surfaces such as grassland, bare soil, and water bodies from the point cloud using a feature that describes to what extent the points are scattered in the local neighborhood. We then applied a random forest classifier to separate the remaining points into vegetation and other. Subsequently, a rectangularity-based region growing algorithm allowed to segment the vegetation points into 2D rectangular objects, which were then classified into linear objects based on their elongatedness. We evaluated the accuracy of the linear objects against a manually delineated validation set. The results showed high user’s (0.80), producer’s (0.85), and total accuracies (0.90). These findings are a promising step towards testing our method in other regions and for upscaling it to broad spatial extents. This would allow producing detailed inventories of linear vegetation elements at regional and continental scales in support of biodiversity conservation and regional planning in agricultural and other rural landscapes.

Lesotho's land tenure regimes: experiences of rural communities and the calls for land reform

2004 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neville W. Pule ◽  
Motlatsi Thabane
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Customary Land ◽  
Ownership Of Land

Calls to reform Lesotho's traditional or customary land tenure abound. The main argument of those who call for reform is that there is no security of tenure, and therefore economic development and foreign and local investment in agriculture are lacking. Lately, traditional land tenure has been blamed for environmental degradation of agricultural land. Using oral and documentary evidence collected in the Rothe Ward, Mafeteng District, and the Mafeteng District Secretary's Office, this paper argues that the traditional land tenure is ambiguous on ownership of land, and is in need of reform designed to prevent various forms of chiefly abuse. However, no evidence of insecurity of tenure per se was found. Instead, poverty and lack of capital with which to acquire agricultural inputs in order to improve production were most prevalent in the responses of rural communities. Finally, the paper ends on a note of caution that reforms as envisaged may have calamitous long-term consequences both for rural communities and the country.

Mamluks, Property Rights, and Economic Development: Lessons from Medieval Egypt

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-424
Author(s):  
Lisa Blaydes
Keyword(s):  
Property Rights ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
Real Property ◽  
Other World ◽  
Collective Resource ◽  
Medieval Egypt

Secure property rights are considered a common institutional feature of rapidly growing economies. Although different property rights regimes have prevailed around the world over time, relatively little scholarship has empirically characterized the historical property rights of societies outside Western Europe. Using data from Egypt’s Mamluk Sultanate (1250–1517 CE), this article provides a detailed characterization of land tenure patterns and identifies changes to real property holdings associated with an institutional bargain between Egypt’s slave soldiers—the mamluks—and the sultan. Although agricultural land was a collective resource of the state, individual mamluks—state actors themselves—established religious endowments as a privatizing work-around to the impermissibility of transferring mamluk status to their sons. The article’s characterization of landholding patterns in medieval Egypt provides an empirical illustration of how Middle Eastern institutions differed from those in other world regions as well as an understanding for how and why regimes come under political stress as a result of their property rights institutions.

scholarly journals THE AIMS AND TRENDS OF THE SUSTAINABLE LAND TENURE FORMATION IN UKRAINE: THE SPATIAL ASPECT

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 131-138
Author(s):  
Mykola Malashevskyi ◽  
Olena Malashevska
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Transition Economy ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Private Land ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Land Redistribution ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
Spatial Aspect ◽  
The Government ◽  
Local Budget

The spatial aspect of the challenge of the sustainable land tenure formation has been scrutinized in the article. There is a set of unresolved issues at the point where interests of land owners, land users and the government clash, that witnesses the absence of effective mechanisms of the formed land tenure system improvement. At the transition to the market relations, with the private land property environment, new effective approaches to land redistribution and rational land use support are necessary. The research objective is the development of a complex approach to the land tenure spatial improvement for the sustainable development. Substantiation is carried out for the transition economy with Ukraine as an example. Land redistribution aiming at urban settlement area optimization and agricultural land tenure in the context of the social environment and economic benefit has been substantiated. The effectiveness of the spatial land improvement in the context of the national and local budget land fee revenues has been substantiated.

Cadastral Systems on the Northern Coast of Peru: Some Problems and Proposals

1964 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-547
Author(s):  
Delbert A. Fitchett
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Land Values ◽  
Northern Coast ◽  
Accurate Data ◽  
Real Property ◽  
The Real ◽  
Underdeveloped Countries ◽  
Essential Components ◽  
Cadastral System

Peruvians who are planning more extensive development of their Northern coast area find the lack of accurate data regarding land surveys, land tenure, and land values a serious obstacle. An effective register of the real property of the area based on a sound cadastral system is urgently needed.A typically faulty element in the agrarian structure of economically underdeveloped countries is the so-called land division or cadastral system regnant. Generally, the main objectives of these systems would be to record and measure the tenure characteristics of (agricultural) land. Their contents would vary according to the goals of the system and the resources available for establishing and maintaining it. The essential components are a registry of rights in land and its accompanying map.

scholarly journals Rural landscapes in Latvia: a comparative analysis of representations and perceptions

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 82-94
Author(s):  
Andris Klepers ◽  
◽  
Iveta Druva-Druvaskalne ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Annual Cycles ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Farm Work ◽  
Iconic Image ◽  
The Impact

As a reflection of Latvian identity, the country’s rural landscapes are a living embodiment of both natural and cultural heritage, contributing to quality of life for local communities and serving as a magnetic pulling factor for international tourists. Traditional farmsteads (viensētas) are perceived as symbolic spaces which have developed gradually, especially since the 19th Century, through annual cycles of farm work alongside extensive farming. Yet their existence is threatened by the impact of transitional changes such as depopulation, globalisation, the non-competitive nature of traditional farming models, and changes in society and the lifestyle of young people. Many abandoned farmsteads are disappearing under large areas of cropland or forest, and some newly built private houses do not have a connection with the traditional rural landscape. The aim of this study is to explore the way that perceptions of farmsteads and rural landscapes have changed over time within local communities. This is done by comparing representations of countryside landscape ideals in the media from 1920 to 1940 and perceptions of farmsteads as an element of countryside landscapes within local rural communities today (<12 % of the population of Latvia lived on a farmstead in 2019). The findings show that in the period when most people lived in the countryside, a particular kind of idealised rural landscape was often visually represented in the mainstream media, strengthening stereotypes about symbolic landscapes. These concepts are still strongly rooted in the perceptions of current rural inhabitants and there was consensus among respondents about the elements which are associated with high-quality rural landscapes. Although the daily routines of the traditional farmstead today have been changed by a number of factors and many elements of the rural landscape have lost their functionality, symbolism — including the iconic image of separate family farmsteads — helps to maintain a continuing metanarrative of national identity, creating nostalgic ties which lead many to have a preference for living in the countryside, holding perceptions about the availability of various ecosystem services next door which will improve their quality of life.

scholarly journals LAND OWNING PATTERNS ON RICE FARMING: Increasing Production and Efficiency

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-115
Author(s):  
Untari Untari ◽  
Maria Veronoca Irene Herdjiono
Keyword(s):  
Data Analysis ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Farming System ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Research Data ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Rice Farming ◽  
Analysis Method ◽  
Primary Research

Merauke has a large potential for agricultural land with a type of agriculture that can be developed, namely a wetland farming system that is very suitable for paddy production. The objectives of this study are: a) to know the patterns of paddy farming, b) analyze the level of production from land tenure patterns, and c) analyze the level of economic efficiency of paddy farming in the pattern of paddy farmland ownership in Marga Mulya village, Semangga District, Merauke Regency. The study used 60 respondents as a source of data and information on primary research data. Data analysis method used to answer the research objectives is farming analysis and R/C ratio. The results of the study concluded that there are two patterns of rice farming land ownership, namely the pattern of ownership of private land and leased land. The two patterns of land ownership show that the pattern of ownership of private land has a higher production compared to the pattern of ownership of rent versus 2,785.71 kg/ha/season and 2,313 kg/ha/season with an efficiency level of 2.57% and 2.51%.

scholarly journals PENERAPAN LARANGAN PEMILIKAN TANAH PERTANIAN SECARA ABSENTEE

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Chandra Dewangga Marditya Putra
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Land Tenure ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Land Ownership ◽  
Agricultural Lands ◽  
Farming Community ◽  
Reform Program ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Control

Untuk menjadikan masyarakat tani yang adil dan makmur maka pemerintah melalui program landreform yang meliputi perombakan mengenai kepemilikan dan penguasaan tanah serta hubungan-hubungan hukum yang bersangkutan dengan penguasaan tanah. Sesuai dengan Pasal 10 ayat (1) Undang-Undang Pokok Agraria telah mengamanahkan terkait larangan kepemilikan atas tanah pertanian secara absentee. Dengan adanya ketentuan tersebut diharapkan para pemegang hak atas tanah pertanian dapat mengusahakan atau mengerjakan sendiri tanah yang dimilikinya sehingga tanah-tanah pertanian memang menjadi produktif dan tidak terdapat tanah pertanian yang di biarkan atau absentee. Tujuan larangan absentee agar hasil yang diperoleh dari pengusahaan tanah sebagian besar dapat dinikmati oleh masyarakat desa tempat letak tanah. Fenomena larangan tanah absentee/guntai secara nyata terjadi, tetapi tidak dilakukan sanksi yang tegas.Kata kunci: absentee, kepemilikan hak atas tanah, pertanian, sanksi. To make a fair and prosperous farming community, the government through a Land Reform program which includes a reshuffle of land ownership and control as well as legal relations concerned with land tenure. In accordance with Article 10 paragraph (1) the Basic Agrarian Law mandates Absentee prohibitions on ownership of agricultural land. With the existence of these provisions it is expected that holders of agricultural land can cultivate or work on their own land so that agricultural lands are indeed productive and there is no agricultural land that is left or Absentee. The purpose of the Absentee ban is that the results obtained from the cultivation of land can be enjoyed mostly by rural communities where the land is located. The phenomenon of the prohibition of Absentee / guntai land actually occurred, but no strict sanctions were made.Keywords: absentee,ownership of rights to land, agriculture, sanctions.

scholarly journals As paisagens rurais: do "determinismo natural" ao "determinismo político

Finisterra ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 40 (79) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carminda Cavaco
Keyword(s):  
Land Tenure ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Rural Geography ◽  
Eastern Enlargement ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ecological Construction ◽  
Production Objectives ◽  
The Eu

Landscape is a recurring subject in the geographical literature and one which has been subject to analysis from a variety of different perspectives. Rural landscapes, in particular, usually account for a full chapter in most rural geography textbooks. Rural landscape is an ecological construction as well as an historical and cultural one, a heritage of the past as well as the result of new dynamics. While exhibiting great diversity, rural landscapes can nevertheless be divided into a number of main types. Many factors contribute to this diversity, from production objectives to land tenure regimes, inheritance regimes, productive structures, logics and strategies and the degree and characteristics of market participation. The focus of this paper is on agricultural and agritrade policies as engines of landscape transformation at the national, international and global levels. Rural policies are also considered in the case of some OECD countries and the European Union in particular. Finally, the foreseeable consequences of the Eastern enlargement of the EU upon the dynamics of creation and transformation of agrarian and rural landscapes is analysed, with special emphasis on the Portuguese case.

Farm, Town, and Country in American Folklore and Folklife

2018 ◽  
pp. 538-556
Author(s):  
R. Troy Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social History ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Rural Landscape ◽  
Rural Setting ◽  
Rural Culture ◽  
Family Farms ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Folk Belief

Seeking remnants of verbal traditions they thought were being lost to industrialization and urbanization, the earliest folklore scholars took to the countryside. Analyzing folk culture in a fuller context, a generation of folklife scholars in the twentieth century set out to identify patterns in the rural landscape in materials, such as traditional artifacts and folk belief, that would illuminate the old traditional way of life and expand the purview of American history. A vital subject requiring more study and that connects to all other aspects of rural culture is traditional farming practices in the agricultural year. With regard to social history, folklife scholars have a critical role in the debate concerning the effect of commercialism on preindustrial farming that have implications for the valuation of family farms, rural communities, and sustainability into the twenty-first century. Among the topics in the rural setting that call for further folklife research are narratives of loss, the creation of local economies, and sense of place.

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