ABSTRACT

This chapter seeks to open discussion of an area of land and housing research that has all too often received little attention in the literature.As demonstrated elsewhere in this book, there have been major advances in land research in recent years, resulting in a refinement of techniques for the analysis of land markets and land-price developments. Assessment of such advances may be framed in terms of neoclassical theorizing or a political-economy perspective, which, in turn, may yield different views on the rôle of public policies. However, such approaches, which take as their starting point either utility-maximizing individuals or interests attributed to structural positions in the accumulation process, run the risk of neglecting the way in which meanings of urban land are socially constructed and reconstructed.