(Feature image credit: Tyntesfield, Somerset. By Chilli Head (https://www.flickr.com/photos/chillihead/))
I have been thinking a whole lot about grand houses and the way people identify with land vs property. In English systems especially those dealing with the nobility, there is a difference between owning property and owning land. This exists in the expressions that define the owning of property as the matter of your personal items, which may include your house and the immediate land that it sits upon, whereas being a land owner has always been about someone who has a more extensive right to a domain.
We see in these estates the ability to pass down land and title through generations whereby people who live in many of these homes today are the descendants of the same family for a millennia. This ability to stay put, stay grounded does create a sense of ownership and entitlement. There is a stewardship that goes with an old house and land, and a fierce protection from loss thereof. This is a notion that came to Turtle Island with the settlers – Much of the traditions of the civil and common laws are built on a notion of property.
In contrast a good way to keep people unstable, and indentured is to prevent the ownership of land and keeping people unsettled in a system where land ownership equates power. A tactic of the nobility in the past was to keep the masses dispossessed of their land, and it is still used to this day.
What happens when a human need is commodified? In this instance, how does placing land as a holding chip for power change the relationship? Can you imagine a relationship where this power doesn’t exist? What happens to the land and housing when the notion of ownership shifts away from commodity?
When you purchase a house, you purchase property. In most places in the Western world, the purchase of property does not include land rights – mineral rights, fracking rights, or oil rights. A property purchase limits the owner to the house, the top of the land all within a restricted border. A condo purchase limits the owner to a large unit box with associated peripheral. Even in large commodified purchase, land ownership is precarious, riddled with complications and rules, and in some ways exists mostly as a concept.
Property ownership is one of the defining features of the white middle class.
One of the best ways to destabilize a population on an individual person by person basis is to destabilize the connection to land. This can be done by creating diaspora, by creating internment(internment camps for the Ukrainians and Germans/Austrians in the First World War, the Germans and Italians, and Japanese in the Second World War), apartheid style land holdings (Reserves spread across Canada), or by creating class divide that causes housing insecurity.
We are seeking submissions of writing (scholarly, creative, poetic, drama, script), images (photography, visual art), video, sounds (music, noise, sound recording) about our relationship to the land and housing. Of course we welcome submissions on all topics, but this is our current focus.
Canada 150 - 500 