Introduction. The politics of land and value

The nine global case studies in this book share a collective motivation: to better understand how the monetary treatment of land as a source of municipal revenue and private profit has become a hegemonic project in the global urban process in the city. Informed by a relational, socially constructive, and pragmatic approach to value, this book sees value as a mode of practice and aims to bring to the forefront how practices around land – for example, how we talk about, regulate, use, change, and dispose of land – shapes, and is shaped by, how we conceptualize and give life to how we value land in practice. Highlighting the usefulness of juxtaposing dissimilar cases as a method of comparison, the nine chapters investigate a set of issues around three key inquiries: how the monetary treatment of land has been normalized into the politics of the status quo, what role tools of land value capture play in the politics of land development, and how communities’ engagement with competing value logics and alternative value practices is the source of a new transformative politics of land development. A value framework serves as a heuristic to deepen the analytical work at five important moments of practice – value creation, value capture, value negotiation, value contestation, and value transformation – while offering insights into how to reengage practices to generate a transformative politics of land and value.