Informalities, Volatility, and Precarious Social Mobility in Urban Slums

As developing countries rapidly urbanize, the number of people living in ‘slums’—neighbourhoods lacking formal property rights and basic services—continues to increase. Whether slum residents will ultimately share in the benefits of the cities they help build or will remain trapped in poverty is not well understood. We review empirical evidence on the potential for social mobility in today’s urban slums in order to assess prospects for upward mobility in cities of the Global South, finding evidence for limited levels of upward mobility and high levels of volatility. We then discuss the substantial public sector interventions that accompanied urbanization in the Global North. We argue that urbanization will not automatically improve prospects for mobility for the urban poor. Instead, it will be critical to implement appropriately nuanced interventions to improve opportunities for the billions residing in today’s and tomorrow’s slums.

Relativized Locality: Phases and Tiers in Long-Distance Allomorphy in Armenian

Linguistic processes tend to respect locality constraints. In this paper, we analyze the distribution of conjugation classes in Armenian verbs. We analyze a type of Tense allomorphy which applies across these classes. On the surface, we show that this allomorphy is long-distance. Specifically, it is sensitive to the interaction of multiple morphemes that are neither linearly nor structurally adjacent. However, we argue that this allomorphy respects ‘relativized adjacency’ (Toosarvandani 2016) or tier-based locality (Aksënova, Graf, and Moradi 2016). While not surface-local, the interaction in Armenian verbs is local on a tier projected from morphological features. This formal property of tier-based locality is substantively manifested as phase-based locality in Armenian (cf. Marvin 2002). In addition to being well-studied computationally, tier-based locality allows us to capture superficially non-local morphological processes while respecting the cross-linguistic tendency of locality. We speculate that tier-based locality is a cross-linguistic tendency in long-distance allomorphy, while phase-based locality is not necessarily so.

Trade and Resource Sustainability with Asset Markets

Trade changes incentives to protect an open-access natural resource independently of its effect on the resource price. General equilibrium linkages cause resource policy to affect the price of privately owned assets regardless of whether they are used in the resource sector. In the closed economy, the asset market in our overlapping generations setting creates incentives for currently living agents to protect the natural resource. The interplay of the asset market and general equilibrium effects causes trade to reverse these incentives. Trade liberalization and the establishment of formal property rights are policy complements: the former makes the latter more important.

Timelines and Temporal Pointing in Chinese Sign Language

We argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee 1973 showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker 2013 argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same loci across domains: no formal property distinguished temporal from individual anaphora. We replicate ASL temporal anaphora data in CSL, but we also display a new finding: CSL allows for locus establishment and anaphoric pointing on two specifically temporal timelines, a sagittal one (past is backwards) and a vertical one (past is up). Not only can temporal anaphora be overt in CSL; it can also be morphologically distinguished from nominal anaphora (various interesting restrictions on the timelines are also described).

On classifiers and affect in the nominal domain

This chapter presents six case studies on the encoding of affective-expressive information in the Dutch nominal domain. Each affective phenomenon that is discussed, displays a formal property that, from a surface perspective, could be qualified as ‘disorganizing.’ It is proposed that disorganization is only apparent and that the affective-expressive nominal expression has an organized structure that falls within the variation space as defined by UG. It is the different formal organization, compared to the organization of nominal expressions with descriptive contents, which yields ‘the feel of disorganization.’ The availability of different grammatical routes provided by UG allows the language user to use her language for distinct communicative functions, including the expression of one’s affective feelings. It is proposed that the Classifier Projection plays an important role in the manifestation of those routes.

Unwritten Rule

In 2012, Cambodia — an epicenter of violent land grabbing — announced a bold new initiative to develop land redistribution efforts inside agribusiness concessions. This book focuses on this land reform to understand the larger nature of democracy in Cambodia. The book contends that the national land-titling program, the so-called leopard skin land reform, was first and foremost a political campaign orchestrated by the world's longest-serving prime minister, Hun Sen. The reform aimed to secure the loyalty of rural voters, produce “modern” farmers, and wrest control over land distribution from local officials. Through ambiguous legal directives and unwritten rules guiding the allocation of land, the government fostered uncertainty and fear within local communities. The book gives pause both to celebratory claims that land reform will enable land tenure security, and to critical claims that land reform will enmesh rural people more tightly in state bureaucracies and create a fiscally legible landscape. Instead, the book argues that the extension of formal property rights strengthened the very patronage-based politics that Western development agencies hope to subvert.

Indirect Recognition

This chapter evaluates the impact of the declaration of Mount Halimun-Salak as a national park by the Indonesian government on the property and citizenship of the local population. It analyzes government–citizen encounters in West Java and the dynamics of recognition in the fields of government territorialization, taxation, local organization, and identity politics. If direct claims to resources were impossible to pursue, people would instead lodge indirect claims. In everyday situations, indirect recognition can perform important legal and political work. After the authoritarian New Order regime, in particular, claims to citizenship worked as indirect property claims and as pragmatic proxies for formal property rights. The chapter examines how people struggle over the past, negotiating the constraints of social propriety for legitimation and indirect recognition of their claims.

Prohibited commoning

Oddly, criminal prohibition can lead to “commoning,” when individuals, left unprotected by state and formal property rights, innovate collective systems to access, use, and benefit from illegalized resources. “Legalization” entails the conversion of these prohibited commons to legal property systems, bringing new freedoms and liberties as well as the dispossession of collectively generated assets (material, relational, and otherwise). This paradox of legalization is currently playing out among U.S. states moving to legalize cannabis. Motivated by the failures of cannabis prohibition and its grievous harms, the question looms: How will states and markets grapple with the collectively generated assets and relational systems generated under prohibition? Building from ethnographic research and survey data, this article argues for recognition of the commoning practices that produced the resources upon which the legal market is based. These practices illuminate ways that legalization may deliver not only markets and regulation but also emancipatory justice in the wake of the War on Drugs. First, we document the commoning practices of cannabis cultivators, the collective benefits they generated under prohibition, and how legalization is affecting these practices and dynamics. Second, we explore strategies, like allotment and pricing systems, that build from prohibited commoning practices to achieve greater collective benefits and the emancipatory potential of legalization.

Shantytown Mexico:The Democratic Opening in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, 1969–1976

The article analyzes political conflict in Mexico through a powerful social movement that erupted in the massive shantytown of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl between 1969 and 1973. In the summer of 1969, after decades of abysmal living conditions, the residents of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl (Neza) launched a payment strike to demand the federal government expropriate the land from private land developers, with the intent to gain urban infrastructure and formal property titles. The rebellion that plunged Ciudad Neza into a state of perpetual strife reflects a juncture in Mexican history when the urban shantytown emerged as a distinct and influential site for mass politics. This article historicizes Mexico's urban shantytown as a political space where the ruling party's entrenched clientelism contended with embryonic forms of local democracy. Revealing numerous contradictions, this case study is emblematic of how the urban periphery was a precursor to the vibrant yet incomplete democratization that would come to define national politics in Mexico and much of Latin America in the 1980s.