The property issue: ground control and the commons

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“Who owns the land?” is a question central to all societies, because space is as vital a resource as air and water. And yet architects seldom explicitly address the question of land ownership. Is this because, as the architect Florian Hertweck writes, they “primarily produce an illusion of the political, not least because they want to see their projects realized”? This issue of ARCH+, co-edited by Arno Brandlhuber and Olaf Grawert, station+/ETH, aims to help change how we view urban land, and encourage land law reform to return land governance to the local level. What is to be done? Not much, because there is no alternative but to politicize land. A lot, because everyone else has failed to do so until now. Politicizing land means first developing a political economy of the city and showing that the current state of Ownership and Access, as the first section is called, is anything but “natural.” This situation is illustrated by