Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS IN DEVELOPING CITIES
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
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Jürgen Oestereich
- Download the draft paper in *.rtf format
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In modern societies private property is one of the most fiercely defended institutions of legal systems. It has to be understood how this came about and why this is so. Very recently, however, environmental problems have caused legislation and jurisdiction to set limits to the unrestrained exercise of property laws.
This recent evolution brings back the fundamental question of historical and non-European societies as to who gives the legitimation to privileged members of the society to enjoy the fruits of private property as an absolute right over specific resources (especially land, but also minerals, man power, knowledge and information etc.).
Not only spontaneous feelings expressed in the concept of "legitimate", but also jurisdictional considerations with respect to a "steady state concept" of society suggest that there has to be control over the enjoyment of private property and that this cannot be exercised effectively at the hitherto exclusive level, the traditional one of the State, but requires a set of levels: at least the Local Community, the State and the International Community.
In this view, the subject matter of legality/illegality of human settlements is but an instance of the general problem of exercising control over (local) resources. An element of its solution would be to introduce the Local Community as a mediator between the individual owner and the State.
In order to fulfil this function, it has to be installed as a subject in its own right, as an integer holder of fundamental rights just like the individual had been installed as a subject by the philosophers of the Enlightment, and which now form the basis of the Universal Human Rights corpus. Consequently, the logic of the traditional two-tiers, top-down and deductive legal system would have to be replaced by the logic of a multi-tiers, bottom-up,
self-reflexive legal system which mirrors the principle of federations.
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net