Community Land Trusts and Informal Settlements in the Global South

During the fifty years since the first community land trust (CLT) was founded by African-American civil rights activists in the United States, CLTs have spread far beyond their country of origin. Most of this growth has occurred in the Global North, but CLTs are now also being formed in a growing number of countries in the Global South.

The fertile seedbed for CLT development in this part of the world has been informal settlements. These are residential areas where people have built their own homes, usually without regard for whatever governmental standards, codes, or regulations that might exist. They have sited their self-built homes, moreover, on lands to which they lack a legal right of ownership or occupancy. Many of these settlements have existed for several generations. Buildings, community ties, and a way of life have become firmly established, even as the residents' tenure has remained precarious.

Community land trusts are being promoted by community activists in the Global South as a resident-led strategy for formalizing tenure and securing people's homes in communities like these. Several chapters in the present monograph focus on the formation or exploration of CLTs in urban areas, including densely populated informal settlements in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Voi, Kenya; Karachi, Pakistan; and Dhaka, Bangladesh. Another chapter focuses on a remote rural area of Honduras, where a CLT is working to secure the watersheds on which widely dispersed mountain villages depend.

All of the monograph's chapters, except for the opening essay by Patricia De Toledo Basile and Meagan M. Ehlenz, were selected from On Common Ground: International Perspectives on the Community Land Trust. This earlier collection of twenty-six original essays was published by Terra Nostra Press in June 2020.

John Emmeus Davis is a founding partner of Burlington Associates in Community Development, a national consulting cooperative in the USA. He holds an MS and PhD from Cornell University and has taught housing policy and neighborhood planning at New Hampshire College, the University of Vermont, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served for ten years as the city's housing director in Burlington, Vermont under Mayors Bernie Sanders and Peter Clavelle. Community land trusts (CLTs) have been a prominent part of his professional practice and scholarly writing for 40 years. In addition to publishing a number of books and articles about CLTs, he was a co-producer for the documentary film, Arc of Justice. He is a co-director of the Center for CLT Innovation. (See also: https: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Emmeus_Davis)

Line Algoed is a PhD researcher at Cosmopolis, Center for Urban Research at the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and a Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. She works with the Caño Martín Peña CLT in Puerto Rico on international exchanges among communities involved in land struggles. She is also an Associate at the Center for CLT Innovation. Previously, Line was a World Habitat Awards Program Manager at BSHF (now World Habitat). She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Leiden and an MA in Sociology from the London School of Economics.

María E. Hernández-Torrales holds an LLM in environmental law from the Vermont Law School and an MA in Business Education from New York University. She studied for her undergraduate and Juris Doctor degrees at the University of Puerto Rico. Since 2005 she has been doing pro bono legal work for the Proyecto ENLACE and for the Fideicomiso de la Tierra del Caño Martín Peña. Since 2008, Hernández-Torrales has worked as an attorney and clinical professor at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law where she teaches the Community Economic Development Clinic.