The Politics of Equity: Who owns the city? - Saskia Sassen
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Leading urban sociologist Saskia Sassen – who identified the global cities dynamic – argued that new and tacit patterns of ownership are having a negative impact on the ‘cityness’, vibrancy and accessibility of urban systems by cutting off parts of the city from public use. Could this form of investment and speculation in cities and buildings be causing de-urbanisation? Speaker: Saskia Sassen Wednesday 25 November 2015 | 18:30-20:00 @LSE https://lsecities.net/media/objects/events/the-politics-of-equity
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I would recommend to Professor Sassen the newly-republished book by Henry George, "Our Land and Land Policy," his 1871 book describing in great detail the destructive policies by which the government of the United States and individual states gave away much of the public domain. The new edition, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, includes important introductory essays and other commentaries.
What is so impressive about Henry George's analysis is his extension of Ricardo's law of rent to the urban environment. Absent the public collection of land rent, the price of land climbs and climbs. And, because the price of land acquisition becomes so high, development must go upward in order to make the numbers work. Human scale is lost. Affordability for "working" people is lost; they must commute from longer and longer distances to find housing they can afford based on household income.
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