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Automatic building extraction has significant socio-economic applications such as population estimation, urban planning, rapid disaster response, monitoring illegal land acquisition, and change det...

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) is mandated to lead in the sustainable management of the country’s natural resources. The continuous migration in forest and forest lands ...

Large-scale inter-city infrastructure projects are proliferating across the Global South as industrial policy-makers have used spatial planning to purposefully transform regions’ economic and urban...

The concept of marginal land in large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) has become important to understand land for LSLA deals. Based on remotely gathered geospatial data, the biophysical dimension o...

Large-scale land acquisitions (LaSLA), otherwise ‘land grabbing’ in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), raise difficult normative questions the current literature does not sufficiently explore. LaSLA is asso...

Social Impact Assessment (SIA) is widely used in the field of international evaluation, but its application in China has been limited. Based on the dual requirements of developing the economy and m...

The economic and environmental significance of school land policy in the United States has yet to be imagined, let alone systematically studied, by scholars. Although the fact that Congress alloca...

This article examines the political narrative around a two-decade old process of land acquisition and development in the ‘global city’ Rajarhat, a former rural settlement in the Indian state of West Bengal. The narrative – exploring the development politics in Rajarhat - is built against the backdrop of a neoliberal state in the Global South acting as a corporate facilitator, particularly in matters of ‘land’, and the concomitant dispossession. The multifaceted politics of Rajarhat takes shape in contrast to the erstwhile communist regime in West Bengal, the dichotomy of a Left state engaged in forceful and violent land acquisition thus forming an interesting paradox. The paper also presents evidence against the long held political myth of caste-relations being irrelevant in Bengali politics, by examining the upper-caste dominated social relations in Rajarhat and the formation of low-level cartels or ‘syndicates’ in the area. In conclusion, the article points to the reinvention and redeployment of caste relations – even in increasingly urban spaces where ‘hierarchical’ caste practices are usually taken to be on the decline - rooted in the duality between land-struggles and development.

As the subject of land acquisition without compensation gathers momentum in South Africa, with current president Cyril Ramaphosa announcing it as one of his main policies, the Julius Malema-led Eco...

In Haiti, two primary pathways to land ownership are through the purchase of land and through inheritance. In terms of inheritance, intestate law treats daughters and sons equally with res...

There are ambitious plans to construct an extensive network of off-road walking and cycling routes, known as greenways, across Ireland. However, land acquisition has proven challenging in some rura...

Sizani Ngubane is the co-founder and Director of the Rural Women’s Movement (RWM). Today RWM is a coalition of more than 500 community-based organisations comprising a membership of 50,000 indigenous women and girls. As a member of the RWM, she has led campaigns that have dealt with issues of gender-based violence, access to education and land rights, property and inheritance rights for rural based women and girls. She has also been involved in providing advocacy training and lobbying National Parliament and policy-makers for policies that will promote equal rights of rural women and protect them in terms of judicial recourse and the right to own land in jurisdictions that are under traditional leadership. The organisation is currently planning to establish a Rural Women and Girls’ Agricultural Skills Training Centre. She is an awardee of the 2018 Woman of Distinction given by Non-Governmental Organisation Committee on the Status of Women in New York City (NGO CSW/NY) in recognition of her outstan...

The concern of Partition narratives has generally been with displacement, loss of identity, alienation, gender and violence, as well as the rehabilitation of refugees. What is elided in them is the...

This study investigates and analyses factors motivating land speculators operating in the urban fringe of Lagos, Nigeria. The paper, in addition to contributing to literature, is the first known at...

This contribution analyses how corporations involved in large-scale land acquisition respond to a countermovement of critics such as non-governmental organisations, local communities, peasant movements, scholars and journalists. Though the countermovement rightly receives much attention, its impact on corporations/investors is less discussed. International guidelines and corporate pledges to ban ‘land grabbing’ in their operations, however, may be signs that critics have some influence. Yet by no means has this proven to be sufficient. Starting from a study of a European agribusiness operating in Zambia, this paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the extent to which corporations are susceptible to a countermovement.

This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘Gender and generation in agrarian and environmental transformation in Southeast Asia’. The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy. Gender and especially generation are relatively neglected dimensions in the literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia. Drawing on key concepts in gender studies, youth studies and agrarian studies, the papers mark a significant step towards a gendered and ‘generationed’ analysis of capitalist expansion in rural Southeast Asia, in particular from a political ecology perspective. In this article we introduce the papers and highlight the importance of bringing gender and generation, in their interaction with class dynamics, more squarely into agrarian and environmental transformation studies. This is key to understanding the implications of capitalist expansion for social relations of power and justice, and the potential of these relations to shape the outcomes for different women and men, younger and older, in rural society.

The rise in transnational land deals has brought nationally inflected concerns about foreign land acquisition into uneasy tension with longstanding scholarly and popular concerns about dispossessio...

This paper traces the nature of resistance in movements against land acquisition in Jagatsinghpur and Niyamgiri in the state of Odisha in India. At both sites, the movements were united in their op...

In this book, Glen Searle takes us on a tour of land acquisition practices and the circumstances surrounding them in different parts of the world. This is a riveting tour for any urban planner in A...

Marine towed streamer acquisition has been largely restricted to just a few geometries which are determined by the streamer separation and number of sources. Most acquisition uses two sources with 100m streamer separations, or sometimes 75m and 50m for higher resolution surveys. Greater flexibility can be gained by using more than two sources and this leads to a range of design options more commonly associated with land acquisition. The aim here is to allow greater tuning of the acquisition to meet efficiency, quality or time restraints of the survey so that so a better match is obtained between the actual and desired survey. The use of multiple sources is in part enabled by the commercialisation of interfering shot energy removal which has long been practiced in land seismic, but is much more challenging with marine streamer data due to the lack of azimuthal and offset variation of the source positions relative to the receivers. The ability to remove interfering shot energy means shotpoint intervals can be reduced, enabling multi-source designs by increasing inline fold, which is needed for successful processing of the data in domains such as 2D CMP and common-trace. With triple sources we show that the options are greatly increased to either improve efficiency or quality and sometimes both, but we can also consider 5 or penta sources with which we obtain very high density data — 6.25m cross-line cells — with acquisition efficiency. A 400km2 survey was acquired on behalf of Quadrant Energy using the 5 source method and in addition a smaller 50km2 using a conventional geometry. Direct comparisons can be made between the geometries and the simple fast-track processing shows the benefits of decreasing the cross-line sampling to fully realise the benefits of broadband data as high-frequencies are fully sampled in the cross-line domain.

This article investigates how land acquisition during urbanization affects labor allocation decisions of farm households in China. We develop an agricultural household model by including land acquisition to examine its impacts on nonfarm labor participation and income. Two data sets (self-designed household surveys at Xingwen County in 2012 and the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) data covering 29 provinces in 2013) are adopted for empirical analysis. The results find that land reduction has significantly positive effects on the probability and the share of family nonfarm labor allocation from both data sets. We also find that land acquisition increases the household income of the land acquisition group in CHFS data.

Forestland divestment by vertically integrated forest products companies (VIFPCs) has spurred significant forest ownership change. To illuminate these dynamics, we examined land sales after VIFPC divestment, subsequent acquisitions of conserved land, and trends in recreational access in Wisconsin. We documented changes from 1999 to 2015 with analysis of tax program records and profiles of the state’s largest investor owners, Plum Creek and The Forestland Group. Nearly all VIFPC land was sold to investors, public agencies, or smaller corporate and private owners. State tax and land acquisition programs buffered these changes: 70% of large private ownership land was retained in the forest tax program and another 16% was acquired by public and nonprofit owners. More than one-quarter of divested forestland was placed in conservation easements. Nonetheless, large private forestland open to public recreation declined by almost one-third. Investor strategies and conservation programs shaped the provision...

At the Third Plenary of the 18th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, the Party announced a number of rural reforms. Commentators were quick to pronounce a win for farmers’ land rights. However, the broader commitment of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to deepening economic liberalization raises the question: can these reforms protect farmers’ rights in the event of land acquisition? The author draws on fieldwork, recent interviews and China’s documented history of land acquisition practice to identify four risks posed by these reforms: undervaluation, elite capture, exploitation and the expansion of the urban underclass. The article concludes that China’s steadfast resolve to expand capitalism in rural China is undermining its attempts to secure rural property rights.

Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the New York Sun, and James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, promoted the Mexican-American War through illustrations that linked conquest with the fulfillment of certain masculine ideals. Both were expansionists who wanted the United States to take Mexican land as spoils of war. But they differed in opinion on how much territory the United States should claim. Beach believed it best to take only the sparsely populated northern portion, whereas Bennett advocated conquering Mexico in its entirety. Consequently, there are important differences in the types of illustrations they published with their war reports that reflect their positions on land acquisition and its connection to the fulfillment of masculine ideals.

International land “acquisition” or land “grabbing” has become a global phenomenon in which India plays an increasingly important role. While there is a critical domestic debate regarding land deals within India — especially pertaining to the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act of 2014 — there is practically no such debate regarding international land deals by Indian companies in Sub-Saharan Africa. By applying a two-level discourse analysis, this article argues that the land discourse within India can be understood as a strategy of exclusion. By linking land issues with questions of “development,” the discursive strategies of powerful actors lead to the exclusion of the arguments of NGOs and others opposed to the land deals from the discourse within India. This strategy of exclusion is then taken to the extreme with the strategy of securitization outside India: land deals are linked to “food security,” as the example of Ethiopia highlights.

Assistance to India from Japan under its Official Development Aid (ODA) programme has been particularly important for infrastructure development. India has been the single largest recipient of Japanese ODA since 2003–2004. Most of it has been directed towards long-term participation in infrastructure, much of which comes from the enormous demand. With the Indian Prime Minister’s visit on 3 August 2014, Japan committed to invest $35 billion in different sectors focusing on infrastructure in the coming five years. This investment will boost India’s infrastructure sector. Poor infrastructure is a constraint to sustaining India’s high and inclusive growth rate. One major bottleneck in infrastructure development is infrastructure financing (along with many others, such as land acquisition, environment clearance, and cost-time overruns). In this context, the paper explores the impact of Japanese ODA on the infrastructure sector in India, the trends and priority sectors for Japanese ODA, and the problems and cha...

This article examines the contentious issue of land acquisition in India, focusing on the deeply regressive system in operation from independence to the mid-2000s that caused wipeouts for millions of families, the flash of resistance to acquisitions starting around 2006-2007, the creation of a new law in 2013 to enhance justice and rights, and an attempt in 2014-2015 to amend that new law. The central questions that arise from this process are: why did a regressive system last so long? and, why did it die in the last decade? These are best answered in a political-economy framework in which increasing political competition has challenged the electoral mathematics of ‘majoritarianism’ and increased the viability of ‘wedge issue’ politics.

This paper sets out a qualitative rapid research framework for designing and conducting field-based studies of the livelihood risks and opportunities (LRO) arising from involuntary displacement and resettlement. The ‘livelihood risks and opportunities’ framework combines insights from the ‘impoverishment risks and returns’ framework and the ‘sustainable livelihoods’ approach. This paper discusses the advantages of the LRO framework over other currently used qualitative and rapid research methods, and demonstrates its application through case studies of conservation-induced displacement in India.

“Voluntary” land transfer agreements, negotiated directly between “willing buyers and willing sellers”, present a seemingly empowering alternative to the use of legal instruments for land acquisition or transfer which entail forced displacement. Yet asymmetrical bargaining power between the negotiating parties can undermine the fairness of negotiated outcomes and the right of the sellers to a “no-displacement” option. Viewed against a complex background of bourgeoning land transfers in multiple sites, this article examines rights-based and risks-based approaches to negotiated settlements, concluding that measures to address asymmetries in bargaining power must look beyond enhanced negotiation procedures to address underlying social and political dimensions.

This article on the development of Beijing can introduce students to many topics found in the urban geography section of the AP Human Geography course outline published in 2013. The author provides...

The opinion article ‘Environmental over enthusiasm’ has considered four case studies such as the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the Land Acquisition Bill, Linear Projects and the Western Ghats Ecology Expert ...

Although there has been much discussion in the literature about the impacts of farmland loss (due to urbanization) on household livelihoods, no econometric evidence of these effects has been provided thus far. This paper, hence, is the first to quantify the effects of farmland loss on household livelihood outcomes in peri-urban areas of Hanoi, Vietnam. Our study found no econometric evidence for negative effects of farmland loss on either income or expenditure per adult equivalent. In addition, the results show that farmland loss has an indirect positive impact on household welfare, via its positive impact on the choice of nonfarm-based livelihoods.

Public, private, and non-profit entities are increasingly engaged in greening post-industrial landscapes in an effort to achieve a broad array of aesthetic, infrastructure, recreational, ecological, and economic development objectives at various scales. Despite this growing level of interest, however, these projects continue to face numerous challenges related to financing, land acquisition, soil contamination, and concern regarding long-term maintenance, just to name a few. This paper begins with an overview of the “nature” of greening activity that has taken place in the USA and Canada and then focuses on three case studies – Elmhurst Park New York City, South Waterfront Portland, and Menomonee Valley Milwaukee – in order to illustrate the planning processes involved in their remediation and development. Key lessons are then drawn, with a particular emphasis on the growing need to attract buy-in and funding by linking greening with other forms of development and broader urban sustainability initiatives.

At the 2006 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation, President Hu Jintao announced the establishment of Chinese Special Economic Zones in Africa (CSEZAs) in the spirit of mutual development and cooperation. The Chinese government launched seven such projects across Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Zambia and Mauritius. In most of these countries, there was social outcry over land expropriation for the construction of the CSEZAs and the resultant displacement of existing settlers. Seven years since their launch, the delayed CSEZA development only exacerbate the frustration of the host African communities as they contemplate whether the land they appropriated for the zone, at the expense of rural livelihoods, is getting an appropriate usage. The case of Mauritius is particularly salient considering its size, location and outward economic dependence.

In rural development, women's access to land is recognized as a condition for reaching gender equality. This contribution discusses the tension between this formal recognition and concrete realities in rural development for traditional Amazonian communities by examining large-scale land acquisitions in Brazil, a land-abundant developing country, in the wake of the 2007–08 global food price crises. This study applies anthropological and legal perspectives to analyze problems related to gender inequality caused by large-scale land acquisitions. It argues that inequalities cannot be resolved by simply changing regulations related to traditional communities’ and women's rights and that gender relations and land tenure issues reflect interconnected social arrangements based on historical specificities of traditional communities. Case studies show that land acquisitions by outsiders disrupt these arrangements, despite stated commitments to social and environmental responsibility. Such “coercive harmony” is only...

Rapidly growing demand for agricultural land is putting pressure on property-rights systems, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where customary tenure systems have provided secure land access. Rapid and large-scale demands from outsiders are challenging patterns of gradual, endogenous change toward formalization. Little attention has focused on the gender dimensions of this transformation. However this contribution, based on a 2008–09 study of land tenure in Uganda, analyzes how different definitions of land ownership – including household reports, existence of ownership documents, and rights over the land – provide very different indications of the gendered patterns of land ownership and rights. While many households report husbands and wives as joint owners of the land, women are less likely to be listed on ownership documents, and have fewer rights. A simplistic focus on “title” to land misses much of the reality regarding land tenure and could have an adverse impact on women's land rights.

This review article argues that analyses of the food security implications of emerging powers in Africa could be strengthened through foregrounding the issue of perspective. Researchers working in this area should engage with food security opinion contests, and avoid obscuring these debates moving forward.

This article attempts to compare the preferred and actual risk allocation and then to evaluate the impact of risk misallocation (if any) on project performance. The results show a significantly negative relationship between project performance and risk misallocation. The smaller the degree of risk misallocation was, the more successful the project would be. One group of three risks (including “Corruption,” “Government's intervention,” and “Government's reliability”) and the other group of three risks (including “Approval and permit,” “Immature juristic system,” and “Land acquisition”) were found to contribute considerably to the prediction of project performance. This article provides information on the impact of risk misallocation on project performance in China's public–private partnership (PPP) projects. To enter and perform well in China's PPP market, private firms should pay particular attention to the identified risks.

Good urban design is essential if transit stations are to successfully connect to the communities that surround them. Increasingly, transit agencies in the US are constructing light rail systems in and above freeway medians to reduce land acquisition costs, minimize traffic conflicts and increase train speeds. Elevated stations, however, are difficult to physically link to surrounding communities, resulting in lost opportunities for transit-oriented development (TOD). This study examines all 14 elevated and freeway-median light rail stations along the Green and Gold lines in Los Angeles and documents the challenges of integrating them to the surrounding urban fabric. It suggests remedies based on a review of good urban design practices and interventions for different contexts that have been successful in improving station access. The study tests some of these interventions using as case studies four elevated Green Line stations.

This paper presents the experiences of 22 displaced families and their battle for water access based on a pilot survey of Manesar, in the northern Indian state of Haryana. Interviews were conducted in the summer of 2011 to examine a water regime recently transformed by compulsory land acquisition and displacement in one of India's driest and fastest growing areas. This dimension of the land acquisition and displacement narrative is a response to the crisis over resource access and control in peri-urban India where a burgeoning demand for land, water, and capital has sparked contentious debates over fairness and equity. Despite recent amendments to the Land Acquisition Act of 1894, long-standing questions regarding compensation and rehabilitation for drinking water services remain unanswered. The findings of this paper show that there may be limits to halting the effects of land displacement altogether without aggressive legislation capping water grabs, or a radical shift in the way in which water is value...

The rush for land acquisition has attracted considerable attention from the scientific community, although actual research on the topic remains thin. This paper attempts to break new ground by studying the potential effects of land deals in the context of a small open economy subject to exogenous shocks. In particular, it makes three main arguments: first, an increase in world prices of the agro-business sector causes skewed effects in the subsistence sector; second, an attractive premium offered by hosts to lure investors may have immiserizing effects; and third, technological efforts will have favorable effects if host countries adopt policies to revitalize agriculture.

This essay focuses on the larger assemblage of elements that promoted and facilitated the sharp increase in foreign land acquisitions by governments and firms since 2006. The concern is not to document the empirics of foreign land acquisition. Conceptually the essay negotiates between the specifics of the current phase of land acquisitions, on the one hand, and, on the other, the assemblage of practices, norms, and shifting jurisdictions within which those acquisitions take place. This assemblage of diverse elements does not present itself explicitly as governance. But I argue it is a type of governance embedded in larger structural processes shaping our global modernity; in fact, it may have had deeper effects on the current phase of land acquisitions than some of the explicit governance instruments for regulating land acquisitions. This mode of analysis is based on the conceptual and methodological work I developed in my book, Territory, Authority, Rights (Sassen, 2008); put succinctly it proposes that ...

With the advent of high-channel count recording systems, one of the major hurdles for increasing spatial sampling density has been overcome. We are able to deploy dense receiver geometries with small group intervals and compact arrays or even point receivers. This allows us to record unaliased signal and noise and therefore do a much better job with noise attenuation during processing. We can then reap the full benefits of long offsets and wide azimuths for processing, imaging and reservoir. There is a need to match the increase in receiver density on the source side. To accomplish this in 3D land seismic we need a significant increase in source productivity while decreasing the source array size. Such productivity improvements can be created by spending less time per source point and by utilizing alternative source methodologies such as slip-sweep and blended acquisition. The following challenge to deliver a clearer image and improved reservoir characterization is to emit and record broadband signals which offer better penetration and resolution. Our solution is to ?performance-tune? the sweep to the vibrator?s mechanical and hydraulic limits. It extends bandwidth for a desired target output spectrum where low frequencies are enhanced, mid frequencies are unaffected and high frequencies retained or extended. In this presentation, we describe our successive technological leaps towards point source-point receiver seismic acquisition and illustrate it with recording and processing case studies from different regions of the world.

In 2005 members of the Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union came to Nigeria for business. These ‘New Nigerian’ farmers, as they came to be known, were granted leases of prime lands each to be developed into ‘state-of-the-art farmlands’. The whole idea was to kick-start commercial agriculture which will eventually pave the way for improvements in agricultural technology in Nigeria. However, one wonders why it is preferable to engage foreigners instead of developing the capacities of the locals for the same purposes and what this portends for both food and human security in Nigeria. This article interrogates the issues and cross-cutting issues of concern in the concrete experiences of the ‘New Nigerian’ land deals. It notes that while many praise the arrangement and its seeming quick gains, the usual privileging of foreigners at the expense of the development of local capacity has constituted a significant downturn and snag with serious developmental consequences. It is further argued that the implications of ...

The Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) have been under Israeli military occupation since June 1967, the Palestinian Authority notwithstanding. This paper will concentrate on two areas: the legal aspect of town planning and home building with respect to the Palestinians and the question of ‘state land’ as a means of land acquisition by the Jewish state.

Since 2006 Singur in West Bengal has been the centre of a controversy over land acquisition for a Tata Motors car manufacturing unit. A local rural movement challenging the land acquisition soon attracted the support of various activist groups and political parties from across India, and in late 2008 it succeeded in forcing Tata Motors to abandon Singur. This article uses the Singur controversy as a prism on the contested and contentious nature of development in contemporary India. I analyse the arguments raised respectively for and against the model of development embodied in the Singur factory by five sets of actors, who have been involved in the Singur controversy: (1) West Bengal’s Left Front government; (2) economists; (3) Singur farmers opposed to the factory; (4) social activists and NGOs; and (5) and opposition political parties in West Bengal. I argue that in spite of massive public attention that the Singur controversy received, and the fierce criticism of the Left Front that it generated, the v...

The special focus section in this issue examines the interface between anthropology and development-forced displacement and resettlement. Anthropologists first analysed the social consequences of displacement, drawing attention to its social costs and the complexity of the resettlement process. Beyond this, they turned their attention to advocacy for those displaced by articulating the policy and practical changes necessary to mitigate the damage. This prologue tracks some key points in that interface. Has this interface resolved the problems of displacement? No, partly because social aspects of displacement are still neglected; however, now people faced with displacement can summon a far wider range of strategies with which to frame their concerns.

In 2006 Singur in West Bengal, India, was chosen as the location for a new far factory that was to produce what would ostensibly become the world’s cheapest car. To make way for the factory approximately 1,000 acres of farmland were expropriated by the state government. Farmers unwilling to relinquish their land refused to comply with the acquisition and organised politically to challenge the legitimacy, both moral and legal, of the government’s exercise of the right of eminent domain. While these farmers relied on a broad repertoire of contention during their prolonged agitation, the courts and the law provided them with perhaps the most important arena for challenging the state. This paper discusses various aspects of the Singur farmers’ use of the courts, asking: (1) How have the farmers in practice gone about accessing the courts and the legal system? (2) What has been their experience of engaging with such a complex system of procedures and institutions that rely on a language with which few ...

Farm forestry has been often linked to family knowledge and needs, and even to local expertise through several generations. Among the several factors that may influence farm forestry, family welfare and support on forest decision making and management are nowadays key arguments to provide a richer and better understanding of the land behaviour of non-industrial private forest owners (NIPFOs). This paper empirically explores and assesses the potential direct effects of the characteristics of the family unit (bequests, household income, forest reinvestments, personal and family labour, logistic resources and professional assistance) on individual forest management in terms of planting, silvicultural and harvesting practices. In March 2004, 103 forest landowners were personally interviewed about their commitment to and involvement in land management during 1999–2003, considering a forest region in northern Spain. The pattern of land acquisition, household dependence on forest products for self-consu...