Session 10. 15.

We will discuss a project that is helping to assemble a politics of relational becoming through land. Colonial capitalism and the ontology that it has imposed is largely produced through a transformation from land as a set of relationships to something that can be bought and sold. Our project aims to use a digital platform to represent and connect projects where people across what is colonially known as the United States are engaged in some form of land decommodication in order to highlight their efforts, facilitate co-learning, and situate the multitude of projects in a common imaginary of decommodification. We will present the platform and model we have selected for this mapping project, noting the limitations that are inherent to technological boundaries and that come with not all projects being “mappable” while also exploring the possibilities for ongoing expansion and connection. Examples include Land Rematriation, Community Land Trusts, Land Commoning, Ecovillages and more.

Affordable rent, let alone home ownership, has become a distant prospect for millions of Americans. A report from 2023 found that 44% of all single family home purchases were made by private equity firms. This, among other macroeconomic shifts, has undoubtedly led to the recently-reported 18% spike in homelessness between 2023 and 2024. Though housing costs in the US continue to skyrocket to ever-increasing heights, policy professionals, housing NGOs, and elected representatives offer few viable solutions. Fortunately, non-professionalized communities are nimbly responding to this consolidation of private property and subsequent lack of affordability in a variety of ways: among them are efforts at housing and land decommodification. This presentation will highlight some of these on-the-ground efforts and will devote particular attention to ways in which other interested communities might extrapolate them for their own locally-oriented purposes. I will summarize relevant economic data that has led to this housing-insecure historical conjuncture and present my findings as an activist-researcher devoted to communizing land and housing. Rather than merely providing practical economistic solutions, I will discuss the importance of intentional governance, the need to re-work interpersonal relations, and the essential transformation of subjectivity that these projects cultivate.

As colonial capitalism disrupts our relationships with each other and the land that supports our livelihoods, plenty of people are searching for new ways to get into right relationship with our more-than-human kin and environment. The past holds many examples of ways of relating to non-commodified land, which is why my research has brought me to find principles that have successfully enabled other ways of being with land throughout time and space. This research has been conducted with Land in Common in mind; Land in Common goes beyond the mainstream Community Land Trust (CLT) model that is at times constrained by a limited vision of conservation or a stepping stone to full participation in the capitalist land market. They instead seek to decommodify the land, believing that access to life itself should not be determined by financial capacity, nor should the means of life be used to generate profit. My research will help to inform a larger conversation within Land in Common about relating to land, each other and to the agreements we make in service of a larger vision of collectivity.

Having worked on and with an immigrant-led worker-owned cooperative farm that is on decommodified land for the past five years, this paper considers the tensions and possibilities of land decommodification processes. Once the land is decommodified, then what? What other practices and ways of worlding must be intentionally designed, imagined, and cared for? Split into three parts, I first detail the ways we were (are) still ontologically occupied by the modern colonial capitalist order while trying to build other world(s) even on decommodified land. Next, I turn to the year we let the land lay fallow, theorizing the land as a fugitive guide toward ways of worlding outside of the dominant modernist imaginary. I then take us there, away from the dominant occupation, by recontextualizing the farm's work in deep time more-than-human relations. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is to help us consider the intentional practices that might move us toward ways of worlding where land, and therefore all of us, are not only decommodified, but also free – free from colonial categorizations, separations, borders, enclosures, and beyond.