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The State and Financialization of Public Land in the United Kingdom
Author(s) -
Christophers Brett
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
antipode
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.177
H-Index - 98
eISSN - 1467-8330
pISSN - 0066-4812
DOI - 10.1111/anti.12267
Subject(s) - scrutiny , real estate , financialization , state (computer science) , politics , asset (computer security) , public land , real estate investment trust , economics , property (philosophy) , property rights , political economy , political science , market economy , finance , law , algorithm , computer science , philosophy , computer security , epistemology
There exists an influential and growing political‐economic literature on the treatment of land—urban and rural—as a financial asset. But this literature pays little attention to the role of the state, beyond its obvious significance in the formalization of tradable property rights. In particular, the issue of the state's own land, i.e. public land, has been afforded scant scrutiny. Has the state, like other actors, increasingly come to treat the land it owns as a form of financial asset? And if so, how, and with what implications? This article addresses these questions by way of an empirical focus on the history of the UK public estate since the beginning of the 1980s.