ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which law 'brackets' human relationships with land to produce and (re)enforce particular forms of land use. It also examines the specific work that legal concepts of ownership perform in disputes about how private land can be used. The chapter discusses the land use planning dispute as one particular space in which disagreements about property occur. Ownership shapes the relationship between private property and planning in order to expose opportunities for the creative rethinking of property relations. Aggregate mineral resources – sand, gravel, rock, and stone – are widely acknowledged to be essential to the built environment as the foundation of infrastructure developments from roads to subways to housing and sewer mains. The centrality of the owner in aggregate extraction decisions is obscured by formal state control of the licensing process and structural opportunities for participation.
