The city is an apartment house: property, improvement and dispossession in early twentieth-century Halifax, Nova Scotia

• Autores: Ted Rutland
• Localización: Urban geography, ISSN 0272-3638, Vol. 36, Nº. 3, 2015, págs. 359-384
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became an important object of political discussion and contestation. Central to these political contests was a particular, theoretically informed distinction between �land� and �improvements.� This distinction would ultimately ground a set of changes in municipal taxation and assessment (introduced between 1914 and 1918) and would help to constitute a new and consequential logic of state action within property relations. Drawing on the literature on property �enactment,� this article examines how early twentieth-century struggles over municipal taxation and assessment reshaped the prevailing understanding of real property in the city of Halifax. Consistent with existing research, I demonstrate how a new perspective on property�including a new distinction between land and improvements�gradually came into being through a series of performances, practices and material devices. Embedded within this new perspective, crucially, was a specific logic of dispossession, a new and calculative rationale for the expropriation and redevelopment of the city�s �underimproved� land. While the literature on property enactment has quite often investigated practices of dispossession, I point out that its analysis of dispossession�s logic or rationale has tended to be confined to a single property theorist, John Locke, and his justifiably famous distinction between land and improvements. Emphasizing the rather different, post-Lockean conception of property that emerged in early twentieth-century Halifax, I suggest that more attention ought to be paid to the multiple and varying logics of dispossession that are liable to be contained within prevailing property enactments.