Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land Ownership

ISBN-13: 9781405191715 / Angielski / Miękka / 2013 / 272 str.

Fiona MacKenzie; A. Fiona D. MacKenzie

Opis

Through original research conducted in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, Places of Possibility shows how community land ownership can open up the political, social, environmental, and economic terrain to more socially just and sustainable possibilities than private ownership.

• Reveals how community land ownership is more just and sustainable than private ownership
• Features original theoretical insights into ideas of property and nature that disrupt the process of neoliberalisation
• Based on original research conducted by the author in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Recenzje

As Fiona Mackenzie demonstrates in her important new book, the Highlands and Hebrides have become, in recent years, the center of a sustained effort to construct an alternative, place–based and more generous politics to that of a neoliberal imaginary Mackenzie has written a book that is thrilling in its optimism and hopefulness. She convincingly explains in compelling detail the hopeful possibilities of the re–commoning in the Hebrides and Highlands. This is rarely the stuff of academic study but is at the heart of Places of Possibility s profound ambitions and most important contribution: anticipating more socially, environmentally and economically generous postneoliberalisms . (Antipode, 1 September 2013)

Spis treści

List of Maps viii

List of Photographs ix

List of Tables x

Acknowledgements xi

1 Placing Possibility 1

2 Working Property 34

3 Working Nature 79

4 Working the Wind 127

5 Working Places 175

6 Conclusion Working Possibilities 214

References 227

Index 248

O autorze

A. Fiona D. Mackenzie is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Honorary Professor, University of the Highlands and Islands. Professor Mackenzie has carried out in–depth qualitative research on the Isle of Harris, the Outer Hebrides, and is the author of Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952 (1998).

Blurb

To maximize the efficiencies of land ownership, the market–driven approach of neoliberalism would have it placed entirely in the hands of the private sector. Places of Possibility reveals how community land ownership can open up the political, social, environmental, and economic terrain to far more socially just and sustainable possibilities than the privatization espoused by neoliberalism. Drawing on comprehensive qualitative research carried out in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, environmental geography specialist A. Fiona D. Mackenzie argues that these possibilities are created through the disruption of prevalent norms of property and nature. The author shows how current land reforms taking place in the islands of the Outer Hebrides are revealed to be places of possibility where neoliberal norms of enclosure and privatization and of a nature separate from the social are unsettled with community land ownership. With a careful balance of original theoretical insights and intellectual rigor, Places of Possibility dispels prevailing notions of neoliberal globalization to reveal the rich political possibilities of community land ownership and its place in the twenty–first century world.