In a new and critical analysis, this book explores the impact of an influential idea - sustainable development - on the institutions and practices governing use of land. It examines the paradox that in spite of increasing attention to sustainability, land use conflict is as ubiquitous and intense as ever.

This book explores the impact of an influential idea – sustainable development – on the institutions and practices governing use of land. The new edition adds a Foreword by Professor John Forester as well as a substantial chapter by the authors in which they reflect on the arguments propounded in the book in the light of subsequent events.

This book explores the impact of an influential idea – sustainable development – on the institutions and practices governing use of land. The new edition adds a Foreword by Professor John Forester as well as a substantial chapter by the authors in which they reflect on the arguments propounded in the book in the light of subsequent events.

Land Fictions explores the common storylines, narratives, and tales of social betterment that justify and enact land as commodity. It interrogates global patterns of property formation, the dispossessions property markets enact, and the popular movements to halt the growing waves of evictions and land grabs. This collection brings together original research on urban, rural, and peri-urban India; rapidly urbanizing China and Southeast Asia; resource expropriation in Africa and Latin America; and the neoliberal urban landscapes of North America and Europe. Through a variety of perspectives, Land Fictions finds resonances between local stories of land's fictional powers and global visions of landed property's imagined power to automatically create value and advance national development. Editors D. Asher Ghertner and Robert W. Lake unpack the dynamics of land commodification across a broad range of political, spatial, and temporal settings, exposing its simultaneously contingent and collective nature. The essays advance understanding of the politics of land while also contributing to current debates on the intersections of local and global, urban and rural, and general and particular. Contributors Erik Harms, Michael Watts, Sai Balakrishnan, Brett Christophers, David Ferring, Sarah Knuth, Meghan Morris, Benjamin Teresa, Mi Shih, Michael Levien, Michael L. Dwyer, Heather Whiteside

This policy focus report examines options that exist for timely and efficient aid to needy taxpayers, including circuit breaker programs that reduce taxes based on income level; truth in taxation measures; deferral options on property tax payments; partial exemptions on owner-occupied or homestead properties; and classified tax rates.