« The administration of settler colonialism: Jerald Sabin, ‘Settler colonialism and the administrative state: The transfer of the Government of the Northwest Territories to Yellowknife in 1967’, Canadian Public Administration, 2024
Climbing settlers: D’Arcy Molan, Katya Johanson, Emily Potter, ‘Repurposing Agricultural Infrastructure to Build Cultures of Democracy in Rural Communities: A Case Study from North-West Victoria’, in Tom Borrup, Andrew Zitcer (eds), Democracy as Creative Practice, Routledge, 2024 »

It’s settler property time! (I think) Hun Kim, ‘Property-time: serial archives, settler logics, and illiberal space–time oddities’, City, 2024

18Jun24

Abstract: Liberal theories of property assume a linear and serialized temporal orientation facilitated by title registries, recording systems, and the exaltation of land archives. These assumptions, what I call ‘property-time’, can be productively put into relation with dominant geographic theories of space in two ways. First, I argue that distinguishing liberal notions of property-time from geographic space–time allows us to observe a key dialectic involving the attachment of value (and capital) to space, a process that tracks alongside contradictions of capitalist desire: the desire to continually reshape space (becoming) and to extract enduring and permanent, individuated value from it (being). Second, liberal temporalities of property struggle to apply in illiberal global contexts. Here, states enact urban accumulation regimes that deviate from linear, individuated and sequential notions of property by manipulating records and surgically erasing past ownership. These acts are often characterized as forms of state variegation and provisionality. They are also endemic to how both capital and value are created and/or arbitraged by states through the land regime. These formations remain difficult to connect to traditional theories about the production of value under capital because assumed time logics of property limit our theoretical capacity to describe illiberal urban accumulation regimes.


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