Framing essay: the diversity of property

Property concerns exclusive rights to the access and use of a resource, the possession of an object or territory with a right to exclude others, or the ability to dispose of or exchange an owned object. The particular property regime that has, for at least the minority world, become a ‘common sense’ is a private and individualized notion of property that is manifest in legal title and state enforcement. Emerging along with the enclosure of the commons in the sixteenth century, this property is also closely associated with the origins and alleged efficiencies and rationalities of capitalism. Contemporary initiatives that disrupt this ‘common sense’ and repurpose property include, for example, the movement of workers to ‘recover’ abandoned factories in Argentina. These and many other projects work to sever property from its association with capitalism by drawing upon property’s many possibilities and, particularly, its potentials for fostering economies that foreground a common well-being.