The socio-legal embeddedness of land markets: landownership structures and regulatory systems in a comparative perspective (France-Luxembourg)

There is limited knowledge on who owns land in advanced economies. However, assets and their ownership are fast becoming a key political issue. More specifically, land is at the heart of discussions around the production of the built environment in planning and policy circles, as well as in the private sphere. There is a need to deconstruct dominant discourses on the land question, and to identify the precise mechanisms through which land affects the production of the built environment.
The DISTRILAND project is a means to advance societal discussions on the role of land in the production of the built environment. This is a dimension that is usually absent of lay and media treatments of large-scale urban developments, such as the development of a new residential area. Discussions of these developments tend to centre on the number of units produced, on their location and on their affordability, but there is usually little discussion of the actors involved (both
public and private) in the development and of their respective influences in shaping the final outcome. This obscures the ways in which landowners and other stakeholders create value through the production of built environment, and thus makes it difficult for members of the public to gauge the operation of land markets.
The DISTRILAND project takes a comparative and mixed-methods perspective on these questions. It focuses on the ownership of land because of its importance in shaping urban-political settings and its inherent distributional effects that tend to worsen economic inequalities as land values increase. The project’s main objective is to empirically generate a typology of landowners that takes into account both land wealth portfolios and land-related strategies, captured through land value chains and interviews. We envision two broad types of land-based wealth accumulation strategies: those based on conservation (in which land value increases are generated without a significant change on the land), and those based on transformation (in which the value increase is generated through the transformation of the built environment).
To do so, the project will compare two urban areas in France and Luxembourg: the metropolitan areas of Aix-Marseille and Luxembourg City. The comparative nature of the DISTRILAND project will make it possible to give this typology transnational validity, and will also serve to increase the legitimacy of research findings. The project envisions its societal impact to come mostly from bringing transparency to the operation of land markets, and through the development of recommendations for local and national level policy makers on how to redirect the trajectories of land plots while taking into account the strategies adopted by their owners.