Advancing transparency, accountability and action on urban land ownership

Who owns and shapes the city?

On 28th November 2023 IHRB, Dark Matter Labs and It's Material co-hosted a workshop about advancing transparency, accountability and action on urban land ownership.

The workshop delved into the critical theme of urban land ownership and its significant influence on shaping the present and future of cities. As a defining stage of the built environment lifecycle, the ownership, planning and use of land has implications for climate action and for multiple human rights, including the right to adequate housing, physical and mental health, and non-discrimination. 

Participants from diverse locations and backgrounds shared their insights and ongoing research on mapping land, revealing various challenges and opportunities in different cities across Europe and beyond.

The session started with presentations of various research projects:

• Dark Matter Labs shared insights on urban land mapping of Copenhagen, and looked ahead to upcoming mappings of the cities of Prague, Athens and Lisbon. The project is a collaboration between DML and IHRB and aims to map the largest public and private owners of land in the four European cities.

• Observatori DESCA shared the Critical Mapping for Municipalist Movements project, which focuses on mapping evictions through the open code platform MapHab, for housing organizations to track and publish eviction-related data.

• Hugo Perilleux of Université Libre de Bruxelles presented the study Ownership structure of rented housing in Brussels, showing in-depth ownership patterns in the city

• The Cities for Rent project showed the investigations done to understand land use changes and speculative tendencies in Western European cities.

Some similar mapping effort which also links to the ones presented is the Kenya WebGIS, a project developed by GeoDevOps to help people in the country understand the ways that land is owned and used.

Participants engaged in discussions about municipal capacity, data protection, and the challenges faced in reducing social housing provision when publicly owned land is released, for instance.

After those collective discussions and breakout group sessions, potential next steps and future directions were developed:

1. Data strategies should be tailored to  different landlord types, with access to data across all types being as readily accessible as possible; greater transparency can actually serve in municipalities’ interest, in terms of facilitating more city-wide planning efforts and initiatives to address housing access, climate change and other issues

2. Greater showcasing of examples on how the data can be used and by whom is necessary

3. Municipalities need to provide longer-term and more consistent transparency, including with regards to their own public land

4. Mapping efforts can expand onto a wider scale, in terms of engaging with regional and global networks and pursuing global mapping of landowners and their territorial action

5. The combination of collective ownership and anti-speculative measures are key aspects for land governance

6. Land ownership patterns should be seen as one key aspect among other dimensions of influence in the city, including flows of public and private finance that shape development trajectories without adjusting the ownership of land per se.