This symposium brings together leading academics and other distinguished scholar-practitioners from over 12 countries across many disciplines including law, planning, urban theory, sociology, development studies, economics, and political science, posing some of the most innovative questions regarding property rights in land today. The Symposium will address the key dilemmas of property theory in the context of global commodification of land that has led to widespread dispossession and contributing to the current world food, housing, energy and environmental crises, and explore alternatives to dominant property rights paradigms such as the commons, social mobilization, and peasant rights.
The symposium results from a research project on property rights in land through the Displacement Research and Action Network at MIT, and is a collaborative project between MIT and the University of Louvain, Belgium, co-sponsored by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.