ABSTRACT

A discussion of land and property entails more than questions of definition. “Choices of property rules ineluctably entail choices about the quality and character of human relationships,” argues Singer “and myriad choices about the kind of society we will collectively create.”1 In this chapter, I want to draw on the struggle in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to reflect on these moralities. Yet the question: What ought property to be? is hard to separate from the question we have already posed: What is property? Given the widespread presumption that property is private property, as noted above, it is not surprising that most moral evaluation has similarly focused on private property’s moral value. In so doing, however, other forms of property are by no means ignored. In fact, one can argue that they provide a vital foil, both in

the sense that dominant understandings of property rely upon them as a constitutive outside, against which to justify private ownership, and-as I shall show later-because dominant forms of ownership are subject to creative critique by those interested in sustaining alternatives.