POLI 248 - Community Power and Property Rights: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Examines community conflicts over land use that call into question the meaning and nature of property and property rights. Based primarily on U.S. cases, the course reviews efforts by communities to regulate, redefine, and ‘take’ property to achieve various public objectives. Objectives examined can be broadly characterized as fitting within three areas: environmental protection, urban development, and social justice. Cases may include community bans on ‘fracking,’ conflicts over fossil fuel extraction on native lands, the displacement of minority communities by eminent domain for public works projects, as well as cases centering on rent control, urban squatting and other responses to gentrification and affordable housing loss. Through such cases, the course addresses both community and property as sites of conflict over the ends of politics and society, while critically investigating competing conceptions of property and property rights. It also closely analyzes the bounds of community power in responding to and altering those rights. The course proceeds from the assumption that ‘community power’ can be used towards a multitude of ends, good, bad, and sometimes, ugly. Ms. Chaves.

Two 75-minute periods.