Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the complex relationship between property and placemaking. Basic property and land tenure choices – including the design of the fee simple itself – shape the places we inhabit in powerful ways. By unearthing this important relationship between property and placemaking, this article also reveals how pervasive – but unorganized – ideas about place and place attachment are across a range of modern land conflicts. Because property law and theory has not been fully transparent about many of these implicit placemaking effects, our property choices have often resulted in outcomes that are unequal, inconsistent, and opaque, prioritizing some existing place-relations while ignoring or rejecting others. By building a more comprehensive placemaking account – with examples from Indigenous pipeline protestors to the absent and now-urban heirs of family farms and the emergence of new build-to-rent suburban housing divisions – this article introduces a new taxonomy for evaluating the relative protection we afford to various place and place-attachment claims. This new framework separates the individual, collective, and ecological benefits of positive place relations from the risks of both over-protected place attachments (as in the case of hereditary land dynasties and exclusive wealth) and land ownership without any attachment at all (as in the transformation of land and housing into asset classes for commodification and financialized capture) …

Shoemaker, Jessica A, Re-Placing Property (August 31, 2023). University of Chicago Law Review, Forthcoming.