This is my sixth note on common ground. The project is starting to find a cadence, and patterns are emerging. One is the phrase “land management” — I’ve written it a couple dozen times. Clearly it's useful to me, though I can’t say that there’s a sharp definition in my mind.
It seems like I’ve been using it as a stand-in for a slough of ideas; land use policy (things like zoning), and the ongoing practice of engaging with natural systems, as well as the overarching system of property rights.
If you fill a basket with land use policy and ecological strategies and property rights, you’re carrying just about everything to do with land. What does it mean to add land to that basket? What happens to unmanaged land?
Squatting
The Netherlands has a long history of squatting: people using land that isn’t being used or managed by its formal owner. During the 1960s — a time of housing shortages in Amsterdam and a counter-cultural zeitgeist — what had been a sporadic, individual illicit activity consolidated into a movement.
In 1971, Dutch national law formally recognized squatting. If a squatter put a chair, a table, and a bed in a vacant space and used it for more than a year, they gained ‘house rights.’ If the formal building owner wanted to reclaim the space, they would have to engage the squatters in court, and eviction was difficult.
Squatted buildings became a weird, generative part of Amsterdam’s vibe. OCCII is a legendary music venue. OT301 is an “alternative, not-for-profit platform as a collective, in which housing, workspaces and public functions are combined to contribute to the arts, politics and subculture.” NDSM Wharf is a radically transformed former shipyard, a that hosts artist studio spaces in a ship hanger, cafes, bars and restaurants, music venues, and an epic flea market. It almost single-handedly made Amsterdam Noord (a formerly industrial zone separated from downtown by the Ij canal) into the city’s epicenter of cool.
The same year as the Dutch government recognized squatters rights, an intentional community was organizing on a disused military base that covered about 84 acres right at the center of Copenhagen. Squatters claimed the area in 1971, named it Freetown Christiania, and declared independence from the Danish state.
Freetown Christiania was motivated by political critique and utopian ideals, much like the squatters movement in Amsterdam. The mission statement of the emerging collective stated that it “is the biggest opportunity so far to build up a society from scratch — while nevertheless still incorporating the remaining constructions... It is the part of the city which has been kept secret to us — but no more.”
The Christiania community established a self-governance model based on only a few principles: Self-administration and responsibility, Solidarity, and Balance with nature. That isn’t to say it is unstructured. The area is divided into 14 self-governing districts, each with the power to make decisions through direct democracy based on full consensus. There is a collective fund, administered through participatory budgeting, that pays for basic infrastructures and services. Land cannot be privately owned in Christiania. The squatted ground is shared in the common interest of the community. Because there aren’t building codes and zoning review, Christiania has encouraged architecture without architects, with spectacular results.
Criminalization and/or Commodification
Although the “anarchist” label has been stuck to both, neither Freetown Christiania nor the squatters movement in Amsterdam are un-managed. Both operate with ideals and very intentional self-governance. They are somewhat utopic in their aspirations. And, because both self-govern independently of the systems they are surrounded by, both have experienced (and caused) friction with the formal state.
Evictions became a flashpoint for protests and violence (see the Vondelstraat riots: a tank in Amsterdam’s streets). Squatting was fully banned by the Dutch government in 2010, prosecutable as a criminal offense rather than a civil infraction. Enforcement resulted in 529 people arrested, and over 330 squats evicted during the first two years.
But squatting — or, specifically, free space and no permitting or landlords — had enabled a certain kind of artistic energy. Examples like NDSM Wharf showed how much value that energy can create… and that was useful to Amsterdam's increasingly “entrepreneurial approach to arts and culture,” and broader “creative city policy.” In 1999, City council created Bureau Broedplaatsen (‘Office of Breeding Grounds,’ or BBp). The office has a mandate to mimic the low cost and lax regulation of squats, but within a legitimate policy framework.
BBp typically identifies vacant land and issues a call for creative entrepreneurs who have a vision for how the space can be transformed. The office negotiates a plan, including a low- or no-cost lease for a fixed period of time (usually 10 years). The BBp offers support for the contracting, permits, and underwriting bank loans. That is a massive benefit, because Broedplaats are often a bit DIY and ramshackle, in both an architectural and financial sense. They’re generally permitted as exceptions, which is do-able because they aren’t intended to stand for a long time. At the end of the lease term, the parcel gets turned over for full-on commercial development.
The aspects of Amsterdam’s squatting movement that intersect with the creative economy have been thoroughly incorporated into the city’s land use planning and development strategy. It’s an incredibly effective tool for “targeted gentrification,” in the words of City Councilor Tom Leenders (in an interview we did in 2019).
Freetown Christiania had a similar dynamic. Clashes here centered on illegal drug sales. In 2004 the government legally abolished the Christiania collective, threatening to evict residents if they refused to buy land and redevelop buildings to code. According to Chistian Wedell-Neergaard, a member of the conservative party, Freetown Christiania’s approach to land “doesn’t meet the wish for a normalization. We (the government) have emphasized that there should be varied ownership-models, such as private ownership... it is natural that there are also privately owned buildings in an area like Christiania.”
After a series of difficult negotiations, the Christiania collective pooled funds to buy 19 acres — about 22% of the original land — below market rate price in 2012. The collective as a whole became a legitimate landowner, while maintaining the principle of shared ownership. Individuals each hold a share, rather than owning title to a parcel. The remainder of the original 84 acres is being developed through the conventional real estate market.
Another way around
The Dudley neighborhood, a little corner of Boston, is the first and only place in the city where a community organization has full control over land use decisions and real estate development — independent of the City of Boston’s Planning and Development Agency. How did this neighborhood gain so much autonomy — the kind that Dutch and Danish squatters have been literally fighting in the streets to achieve?
During the 1960s and 70s, the Dudley neighborhood was increasingly derelict. Between a third and a fifth of properties were abandoned, arson schemes to collect insurance payments were (allegedly) common, and toxic waste was routinely dumped on lots throughout the neighborhood. The land wasn’t obviously valuable to the City or developers. It mattered to the community, but local investment was impossible: residents, primarily people of color, were systematically denied permits and loans.
With a philanthropic grant, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) was formed in the mid-1980s. One of its first projects was a campaign to stop the toxic waste dumping. Building on that momentum, DSNI created a long-term plan for redevelopment. It wasn’t conventional — the plan was grounded in local ownership — and it was bold — rather than improving a scattered handful of properties over time, they aimed for a critical mass of lots that could be improved as a whole neighborhood. DSNI began mobilizing a political agenda with the City. In 1988, the Dudley Neighbors Community Land Trust was approved as an independent Urban Redevelopment Corporation and formally gained power of eminent domain.
The organization engages in community land use planning, and can claim and purchase land. The land is owned and managed through a Community Land Trust (CLT), which has specific rules that maintain affordability. This is a principle DSNI calls “Development Without Displacement.”
“DSNI plans and controls the physical development of the neighborhood; working with residents and partners to implement strategies to address the displacement caused by rising rents and property values that are pushing out many long-term residents and threatening the victories won by the community,” — DSNI.
The Value of Land Transformation
Amsterdam, Christiania and DSNI show what’s possible when a group of people get together and and go about the business of living on land. Each has involved the hard, long-term work of community building and real estate development. Each has created an incredible amount of land value. Looking at land that starts out unmanaged is useful, because it sets a baseline zero. That makes it easier to see value-creation as a function of different land management approaches, and probe questions about who the value should belong to.
Amsterdam squatters intervened on individual parcels. That got absorbed into a gentrification program that primes land for future development. Christiania commune created value on a larger area, through whole-community building. In the end they were only able to afford 22% of what they built. DSNI worked on a larger area, and set protections on future value.
The surface-level takeaway is: Don’t expect someone to give you land after you’ve made it more valuable!
But I don’t think it’s so simple. Who has a claim to the future value of land that is un-managed? And what happens if the person who creates that value isn’t the owner? And what if someone derives value from land, but that activity doesn’t end up creating real estate value? Do future-value-capture mechanisms disincentivize value creation activity?
Typically, created-value accrues to the owner. But the notion that private ownership is “natural,” as Copenhagen conservative Wedell-Neergaard put it, starts to feel very arbitrary, in light of the alternative that Christiania demonstrates. The value only exists because of the whole-place development approach. “The wish for normalization” into a property rights system isn’t the community’s — it’s the City’s, and it’s rooted an inherent bias to collect land tax. Or, as Leenders put it, “targeted gentrification.”
It’s tempting to imagine a city of un-managed land, one without individual property rights, one that looks like Freetown Christiania or an Amsterdam squat. Residents of that fictive city can freely use land and actively engage in making the place better. But there are clear problems, even without friction against a classical property rights model. Two stand out to me, in particular.
First, the newly created value becomes increasingly difficult to manage. People start to make competing claims to it. Can you expect returns on investment in improving the land? What if I grow apples — can I sell them and pocket the money?
Second, what if someone genuinely gains value from using land, but doesn’t physically improve it (the opposite of speculation)? This applies to passively letting land perform ecosystem services (green belts for flood water runoff). It also applies to encampments of people who are unhoused (this is a huge topic and I will dive into it soon; there isn’t space here). If someone else has a “better” idea for creating value, should they be able to claim the land?
DSNI started by legally securing land in a community trust. This structure has a fiduciary responsibility to steward future value in perpetuity, and a clear mechanism for making land use decisions based on their long term social and environmental impact. Letting land sit un-improved might be the most desirable choice, for any number of reasons. The trust deals with the future value that emerges from a whole area — a scale that is entirely absent from traditional, individual property rights.
Crucially, the CLT considers the land itself as separate from the building sitting on top of it. That means you can own a house in Dudley, but you can’t own dirt. You can sell your house, and you can gain back the value of improvements you’ve make, but the amount of mark-up is limited. You can’t speculate, you can’t flip.
A trust isn’t always effective, and it isn’t the only model. I think there need to be more options for working on larger scales (communities, not parcels) and managing future value.