"An essential read for anyone interested in the ideas and interests that have shaped property and its preeminent impact on our modern world." --John Boughton, social historian and author of Municipal Dreams
"An invaluable contribution to the pressing debate around the role and purpose of property which underpins the way we live today." --Anna Minton, author of Big Capital
A powerful examination of how property shaped the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedoms and stability it was meant to sustain.
Property carries a great promise: that it will make you rich and set you free. But it is also a weapon, an agent of displacement and exploitation, the currency of kleptocrats and oligarchs. In Britain, it has led to a new class division between those who own and those who don't.
Property is a vivid, far-reaching analysis of our concept of property ownership, from 16th-century enclosures to the present day. It tells powerful stories - of life in the developer-led boomtown of Gurgaon in India, of the struggles to form Black communities in Missouri and Georgia, of a giant experiment in co-operative living in the Bronx, of the impacts of Margaret Thatcher's "property-owning democracy."
Above all, Property asks how we have come to view our homes as investments - and it offers hope for how things could be better, with reform that might enable the social wealth of property to be returned to society.
