Text

theses

The community land trust is a model of communal land tenure that has become increasingly popular in the last ten years. This popularity has come from the model’s utility in providing affordable housing. This has led to less consideration of the model’s capacity for economic reform through communal land tenure, which was a large part of the model’s original intended purpose. This intention seems to have been left by the wayside as a result of the CLT’s integration into the broader community development field. To better understand this, I ask the question: what role does land tenure reform actually play in community land trusts? This research question is framed by the concept of performance, which suggests that our ideas and beliefs are not only a product of the context in which they arise, but contribute to that context in ways that challenge and/or reproduce it. To provide the empirical work to answer this question I designed a qualitative research project. This project used three scales of research to explore the implementation of community land trusts: an analysis of mission statements from CLTs across the country, a series of interviews with CLT practitioners, and two case studies of individual CLTs. While my research question and the empirical work focuses on the role of land tenure in community land trusts, it is also my hope that this dissertation will contribute to a better understanding of how community development can be understood as performance. The conclusions include a discussion of the potential significance of community land trusts as a challenge against the expanded role of financialization in the global economy.

ETD_7239

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Brian Stromberg

doi:10.7282/T3J968JX

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.