We know that private property allows its holder to exercise choice about how to use and to shape our social and physical world. What makes that choice possible is power. At the risk of hyperbole, all theorizing about property, in one way or another, explores the nature of that power. Yet, for all that, we often fail to see the effect of that power on us. Andrew Leach and Jasper Ludewig, in an interdisciplinary study of the history of architecture, Back to the Land, pull back the curtain on what property allows.
Property theory tells us that property is neutral—property alone cannot shape the world in any particular way. It allows, as scholars like Larissa Katz argue, its holder to set an agenda about land. Yet, even then, the agenda alone cannot alter the physical or social world. That requires something more. Leach and Ludewig suggest that, for land, that something more is architecture: “a series of themes…bind architecture to land: race and labour, colonial territoriality, property formation and transfer, extraction, and governmentality. Th[e] land is not stable, as a ground-plane, but read through forms of representation and intervention that render it something other than what it once was.” (P. 40.)
Leach and Ludewig’s exploration of the European imperial colonial project in Australia (and the interaction between architecture and property within it) provides an example of agenda- setting. They write that “country (in Indigenous terms) after 1770 becomes property, defined by legal devices, as well…as by both fences and defensive practices, upon which building becomes an improvement; what happens thereupon becomes the property owner’s (or leaseholder’s) contribution to markets that might be local, or half a world away…and for which they are compensated through sale of capital accumulation.” (P. 40.) And yet, as Leach and Ludewig argue, even those scholars who consider the interaction between property and architecture presuppose a material separation between land and architecture, as though one can simply study the details of a farmhouse, or the disposition of a sawmill, while acknowledging the deeper relations with land and property as a field in which it participates. That is to say, land remains the setting for an architecture that bears ideas that can be understood through historical enquiry. The nature of the relationship might change…but the historiographic categories themselves (land and building) remain firmly in place. (P. 40.)
In other words, the literature treats the two disciplines as separate categories. They are not. And that is the core of Leach and Ludewig’s claim: to “suggest how historians of architecture…might move past this material separation, locating architecture not only within, but as constituent of, the problem of land….” (P. 41.)
It is easy enough to dismiss Leach and Ludewig’s piece as relevant only to historians of architecture. One does so at one’s peril. For what is so often lacking in both the scholarship of property theory and in the law of property law is a full account of the truth that when we consider property—power over the use, control, and access to things—we ought to consider the impact of that power on people. Property theory does a fine job of exploring the existence of power in the (neo)liberal conception; property law does equally well at explaining when it is that a person can be said to hold that power in the abstract categories which the law constructs using the (neo)liberal conception. But neither are particularly adept at demonstrating what, precisely, that power—invoked in the abstract legal vehicles established by a legal system—allows its holder to do with a particular thing—land, chattels, or intangibles—and what, in turn, that means for the lives of others. What can the holder of property in land, in chattels, and intangibles do with the power over a thing? For it is in that power to choose how to use something that we have the power to make choices that will affect others, both positively, but more often, negatively. And it is architecture that reveals what property allows us to do.
To demonstrate this, Leach and Ludewig focus on the European imperial project that brought about the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. They argue that “in conferring rights and obligations to landowners, property systems transform land into a tool of governance grounded in the state’s claim of sovereignty. The state’s conferral of power over land to individuals is, in this sense, an apportioning of sovereignty to landowners, contingent on the latter’s fulfilment of sanctioned forms of construction and development.” (P. 44.) And that resulted, as is now well-known, in the widespread dispossession of Indigenous peoples, with all of the concomitant losses of ancient culture that went with it.
The argument advanced by Leach and Ludewig can be applied to any system of property dealing with any sort of thing—land, chattels, and intangibles. The system of property is always a state conferral of power apportioning sovereignty to its holder—power—which in turn allows for sanctioned forms of development. And that, in turn, has consequences for people, as much today in our modern world as it did for Indigenous peoples during the European imperial colonial project.
Pointing out the effects of property on people in our modern world is not to suggest that the imperial project did not bear tragic and abhorrent consequences for Indigenous peoples everywhere. It is, rather, merely to state what one hopes is now apparent: that property has not changed its core focus in the intervening years. It remains a state conferral of sovereignty on a limited class of persons, often to the detriment of a great many others.
Morris Cohen, in the classic Property as Sovereignty, was among the first to recognize that the state conferral of sovereignty brought with it consequent problems for others, and that those problems are intrinsic to property. But Cohen wrote a long time ago, and memories are short. We need regular reminders of what property is and what it allows. Leach and Ludewig do that, in this timely, necessary, and eloquent essay.
