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This paper aims to ground Harvey’s (2003) top-down theory of “accumulation by dispossession” in the everyday lives of people and places with specific focus on the role of law. It does this by drawing upon the lived experiences of residents on a public housing estate in England (UK) undergoing regeneration and gentrification through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI).

Members of the residents association on the Myatts Field North estate, London, were engaged as action research partners, working with the researchers to collect empirical data through surveys of their neighbours, organising community events and being formally interviewed themselves. Their experiential knowledge was supplemented with an extensive review of all associated policy, planning, legal and contractual documentation, some of which was disclosed in response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Three specific forms of place-based dispossession were identified: the loss of consumer rights, the forcible acquisition of homes and the erasure of place identity through the estate’s rebranding. Layard’s (2010) concept of the “law of place” was shown to be broadly applicable in capturing how legal frameworks assist in enacting accumulation by dispossession in people’s lives. Equally important is the ideological power of law as a discursive practice that ultimately undermines resistance to apparent injustices.

This paper develops Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession in conversation with legal geography scholarship. It shows – via the Myatts Field North estate case study – how PFI, as a mechanism of accumulation by dispossession in the abstract, enacts dispossession in the concrete, assisted by the place-making and ideological power of law.

The purpose of this paper is to discover the operational character of gated communities in Malaysia.

This paper is based on a small case study conducted in Iskandar Malaysia, an economic development region located in the southern part of Peninsular Malaysia. In the case study, 12 housing developers were interviewed, involving 32 gated communities altogether. The investigation covered the identification of the governing document used in operating a gated community, the operational purposes and scopes, the arrangement for collection of maintenance fee, and the internal governance within the gated communities.

From the analysis, it was found that two types of gated communities exist in the case study areas, namely the strata gated community scheme, and the gated community scheme (GACOS). The operational mechanism for the former is through a set of rules enforced by the government. Meanwhile, the latter is based on the arrangement set up either by the developer, where legal agreement is applicable, or through the consensus among homeowners. However, despite these differences, both mechanisms share the same intention, that is to operate the gated community based on cooperative-collective sharing arrangement.

Despite the vulnerability of GACOS enclosure components, the case study revealed that the number of GACOS is still bigger than the strata gated community scheme. Since this perspective is lacking in this paper, it is suggested that more studies are conducted to explain the reasons behind the indicated phenomenon.

The most important contribution of the paper is to highlight the importance of gating experience that is heavily influenced by the local policy setting to determine the survival of a gated community; thus, demonstrating how different they are from each other.

Buildings alone do not matter, it is only the ensemble of streets, squares, and buildings and the way they fit together that comprises the true principles of good urbanism and place making. One of the main rules of good urban design is the quality of the public space. This paper analyzes the importance of creating & maintaining a true public square in contemporary urban condition, as one of the built environments' pillars for sustaining social and cultural identity.

Criticism has been posed towards the (neo) romanticizing the importance of European squares (as some critics would call it “Postcard Squares”) in everyday life and contemporary town planning. Movements such as New Urbanism, which promote good urban design have not put squares that high on their urban design agendas. Also the usage of the historic European city's public realm model - the square - as the important ingredient for all urban places has not been forthcoming. To investigate this phenomena, and facilitate the discourse, The Square of the St. Blaise Church (Luza Square) and the Gunduliceva Poljana Square in the Old City of Dubrovnik, are analyzed and reflected upon through various data collection, theory reflections and urban design evaluation methods, such as Garham's Sense of Place Typology-Taxonomy.

If cities have livable and vibrant social spaces, do residents tend to have a stronger sense of community and sense of place? If such places are lacking, does the opposite happen?. This paper seeks out to answer these questions. Finally the paper also looks at how the phenomenon of creating good social spaces through creating ‘third places’ is achieved and confirmed in the squares of Dubrovnik.

The National Training Reform Agenda (NTRA) (1989‐1996) was the first iteration of a series of reforms designed to make the Australian workforce more skilled, efficient and productive. This paper critically examines how women became “(un)known” in these policy texts in relation to work and training. It also examines contemporaneous practices in some workplaces that assigned certain work identities to women and examines how the women resisted or acquiesced to these assigned identities within the discursive field of the workplace. Comparisons of the positioning effects of policy and workplace practices are made and an argument is presented regarding the marginalisation of women within seemingly benign policy discourses and organisational practices.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

Social policy in early modern Ireland, like England, was primarily orientated towards the perennial problem of poverty. Despite the effect of war and famine, trade began to prosper in sixteenth century Ireland and continued to do so until after the Napoleonic Wars, albeit, interspersed with occasional depressions and minor famines. The effect of this growth in trade on population was explosive. Between 1672 and 1791 population more than tripled from 1.1 million to 3.8 million. England, as a result of the establishment of the Elizabethan Poor Law, in 1601, had achieved a relatively sophisticated poor relief system based on a crude categorisation according to abilities and needs, the introduction of a carceral system of discipline for the able‐bodied poor, and the compulsory levying of a poor rate. Ireland relied primarily on a system of punishments supplemented by proselytization, and tended to treat the poor as a unitary category, with the exception of children.

“All things are in a constant state of change”, said Heraclitus of Ephesus. The waters if a river are for ever changing yet the river endures. Every particle of matter is in continual movement. All death is birth in a new form, all birth the death of the previous form. The seasons come and go. The myth of our own John Barleycorn, buried in the ground, yet resurrected in the Spring, has close parallels with the fertility rites of Greece and the Near East such as those of Hyacinthas, Hylas, Adonis and Dionysus, of Osiris the Egyptian deity, and Mondamin the Red Indian maize‐god. Indeed, the ritual and myth of Attis, born of a virgin, killed and resurrected on the third day, undoubtedly had a strong influence on Christianity.

If ever Africa had disappeared, it has now reappeared on the maps of investors seeking for land and resources. The entire continent seems to have become attractive for international financial institutions, which intensify their recommendations to single national Governments in order for them to further remove obstacles and make Africa an “ever better place to do business”.

Rwanda represents an emblematic example of the rapidity and size of transformations Africa is faced with, which touch every sector, from the land ownership model to the modes of land use, from the distribution of population, to the construction of infrastructure.

It is a fertile country, with a good water supply and two crop seasons, and is almost entirely cultivated. The majority of the inhabitants work the land, and subside thanks to agriculture. Today, however, the Government's goal, synthetically expressed in the slogan that defines the future of Rwanda as Africa's Singapore (Vesperini, 2010), is the modernization of agriculture, and the reduction of its weight in favour of a service economy. The most visible effects of this approach are the expulsion from the countryside of a huge number of families which lose any type of sustainment, and the grouping of many small plots in large territorial extensions which are often given for long term use to multinational agribusiness corporations. The transformation of agriculture is accompanied by the redistribution of population, traditionally settled in scattered patterns across the whole country. The massive migration from the countryside is explicitly sought by Government, whose target is to reach, by 2020, a 35% urbanization rate up from today's 18%.

The three issues, total and unconditional opening to foreign investment, population resettlement and transformation of the agricultural activities, which are the pillars of the development programs initiated by Government and international advisors, are producing dramatic changes on the physical and built environment, and affect the living conditions of the weakest groups (White, Borras, Hall, Scoones, Walford, 2012).

The paper proposes a reflection on themes which have general relevance, but which also need to be locally grounded. Of particular importance are urbanization, the relationship between towns and countryside, and the relationship between social and economic structure and territorial planning.

In 2012 the author took part as consultant to the drafting of the Urbanization sector strategic plan 2012-2017. The views expressed here are personal and do not in any way represent the Government or Institutions’ point of view.

This paper aims to analyse the extent to which privatising – or denationalising land – has legal and policy effects.

It applies the law in context scholarship to the question of land privatisation.

Of all the recent privatisations in England, the most valuable, and yet least recorded, is of land. According to one estimate, two million hectares or 10 per cent of the Britain landmass, left the public sector for private ownership between 1979 and 2018. Privatisations include land that is sold, leased or where a public body changes its status. This paper aims to explore these privatisations, considering them as denationalisations, concluding that the effects are most significant in housing where the differences between social and private renting in relation to rents, the security of tenure and housing quality are striking. Moreover, although other public law restraints on the state-owned property are often limited, they are also still significant, facilitating scrutiny, particularly in combination with the public sector equality duty or site-specific duties for libraries, allotments or playing fields. All the sites disposed of to private developers, landlords and companies have lost these protections.

This is the first time this question has been considered in this way from a legal perspective.

Index by subjects, compiled by K.G.B. Bakewell covering the following journals: Facilities Volumes 8‐17; Journal of Property Investment & Finance Volumes 8‐17; Property Management Volumes 8‐17; Structural Survey Volumes 8‐17.