ABSTRACT
Introduction De Soto’s thesis that securing formal property titles for the poor provides a good, perhaps the best, chance of releasing their capital, enabling them to access credit and thereby emancipating them from poverty ‘in the grubby basement of the capitalist world’ (de Soto 2000: 20), has inspired a wide range of critiques. Several commentators have pointed to what they regard as the spaces or absences in de Soto’s rhetoric, which potentially distort any assessment of the benefits or otherwise from legalisation of land tenure (Varley 2002; Lea 2002). One perceived absence in de Soto’s argument, for instance, is a lack of differentiation within the category of people who are central to his thesis, namely ‘the poor’, or indeed in the categories of ‘migrants’ and ‘extralegals’ to which he makes less frequent reference.
