Faces of Land Policy is part of a series of posters by the late Prof. Ben Davy. Each inspired by land use, planning, and / or law texts. The posters tie together the visual with the inspirational, the imagery with complementary texts.
Prof. Benjamin Davy passed away on January 24, 2025, at the age of 68 in his home. Benjamin was an outstanding academic in research and teaching of land policy and spatial planning. He was a devout member of the PLPR community, and we will forever remember his immense contribution to theory, teaching, and practice. Ben leaves us with a host of posters he’s created, which feature in our monthly newsletter.
October 2025
Earlier in 2025, Professor Benjamin Davy had passed away, leaving a void in PLPR’s community. In his memory, we have created one last poster in the “Faces of Land Policy” series (shown above, image by Prof. Thomas Hartmann).
Ben left us a host of stunning photos he took throughout his travels, each coupled with a quote by a notable scholar. Beyond academic exploration, scholarship, and research, PLPR is a community of like-minded enthusiastic scholars whose research stands at the intersection of Planning, Law, and Property Rights.
Ben’s ‘Faces of Land Policy’ :
September 2025
Catherine Brinkley is an Associate Professor in Human Ecology, Community, and Regional Development in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of California at Davis. Her 2020 essay Hardin’s Imagined Tragedy is Pig Shit calls for planners to re-center urban commons. The “piggery district” in upper Manhattan was an urban common that was destroyed by the wealthy elite, not by congestion, over-use or other forms of Hardin’s imagined “tragedy of the commons”. Frederick Law Olmstead designed New York’s popular Central Park that replaced the unruly commons which provided homes and livelihood for Manhattan’s poor.
July/August 2025
Karen Bradshaw is a professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law Arizona State University. Her 2020 book Wildlife as Property Owners suggests that excluding animals from a legal right to own land is causing their destruction, yet extending the legal right to own property to wildlife may prove its salvation. If property rights are the cause of destruction, however, why would enlarging the group of landowners secure salvation? Limiting property in land to humans and corporations has displaced and denigrated pigeons – descendants of domestic pigeons (Columba livia domestica) – and other feral animals living in Bielefeld and cities elsewhere.
June 2025
Rarely has AESOP (the Association of European Schools of Planning) been challenged for its Eurocentric and racist approach to planning and land. A remarkable exception occurred during the opening ceremony of the AESOP Annual Congress in Gothenburg (Sweden) in 2018. In her invited keynote, Ananya Roy addressed the delicate relationship of spatial planners to land that has been taken by occupation, theft, or unfair trade. In other words, to all of the land that Western planners. Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning, Social Welfare, and Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her keynote has been published partly in the 2021 essay Planning on Stolen Land.
May 2025
Mona Fawaz is Professor in Urban Studies and Planning at the American University of Beirut. Professor Fawaz, in many of her academic publications, has been critical of neoliberal presentations of property as a neutral tool for the distribution of scarce resources. Her 2014 article The Politics of Property in Planning discusses Hezbollah’s reconstruction of the Southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. A full moon is reflected in the Bültmanns Hof pond in Bielefeld (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany). Like with many reflections, distortions are inevitable.
April 2025
Sheila Rose Foster is a tenured Professor of Climate at the Columbia Climate School, and Daniel Bonilla is full professor of law and a lawyer at Universidad de los Andes. Professor Foster has published on urban commons and environmental justice, Professor Bonilla about the theory of property as a social function by Léon Duguit (please note that Foster and Bonilla belong to the group of scholars, who reduce Duguit’s theory to “the social function of property”). The two oil paintings by Dürer (1518) and Cranach (1524) presenting the suicide of Lucretia have been displayed side by side in 2024 in the AltePinakothek in Munich (Germany). Please note that Lucretia, according to both painters, commits suicide by stabbing herself in her right side.
March 2025
Vanessa Watson (1950–2021) was a professor in the City and Regional Planning program and deputy director of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Professor Watson emphasized the relevance of Southern Theory to spatial planning. The poster quotes from her 2013 article Planning and the ‘stubborn realities’ of global South-East cities: some emerging ideas.
The monument of Dr. Karl Lueger (1844–1910), the infamously antisemitic mayor of the City of Vienna, has frequently been vandalized or – depending on your viewpoint – cleansed from shame. The poster shows a detail of the monument in 2023.
January/February 2025
Lee Fennell is Max Pam Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. Professor Fennell, always challenging orthodox doctrines, has published extensively on property. Her 2011 article Ostrom’s Law: Property Rights in the Commons explains Elinor Ostrom’s observation that “a resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory”. The quote on the poster reflects on polyrational property. The Canna Indica fleeing from a private property in Melville (Johannesburg, South Africa) symbolizes the desire and futility of modifying entrenched views on property.
December 2024
Vicki L. Been is an American lawyer, public servant, and professor, who served as the Deputy Mayor of New York City for Housing and Economic Development from April 2019 through December 2021. In several books and many articles, Professor Been has presented a critical view on property rights, political theories, and economics. Her 2002 article Does an International ‘Regulatory Takings’ Doctrine Make Sense? puts some doubt on the transferability of American property rules. Each New Year’s Eve, the lockers in my Johannesburg gym are opened and cleared out. Property theory, burdened by ideology and a lack of critical reflection, would benefit from a similar approach.
November 2024
Yvonne Rydin is Professor of Planning, Environment, and Public Policy at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (United Kingdom). Based on her background as economist, Professor Rydin has published extensively on the relationship between spatial planning, environmental protection, and sustainable development. Her 1998 article on Land Use Planning and Environmental Capacity contributed to understanding in what ways planning instruments could and should be used to foster sustainable development. Savoy cabbage (Brassica oleracea), sold at the Bielefeld farmers market, has a complex epidermis; so does spatial planning.
October 2024
Carol M. Rose is the Gordon Bradford Tweedy Professor Emeritus of Law and Organization at Yale Law School. In numerous books and articles, Professor Rose has developed a progressive concept of property. Her 1995 article Property as the Keystone Right? called into question whether the American variety of property rights can be introduced into Eastern European systems without modification. The monument of Sisi in Wiener Volksgarten is a place of pilgrimage of young women worldwide, who worship the assassinated Austrian empress Elisabeth (1837–1898) as their collective property.
September 2024
| Elinor Ostrom (1933–2012) was an American political scientist and political economist whose work on common pool resources revolutionized the way in which academics approach “the commons”. Ostrom was an acute observer of social practices and contributed to the understanding of institutions. She advocated institutional pluralism, rejecting to impose institutions to one area merely on the grounds that these institutions have worked previously in a different area. The waste incinerator in Wien-Spittelau was fiercely contested by Vienna’s wealthy elite, but decorated with design elements by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, today is a beloved tourist destination. |
July/August 2024
Barbara Masekela (b. 1941) is a South African poet, educator, and activist. Her autobiography Poli Poli (2021) describes her growing up with her grandmother in KwaGuqa – the Place of Kneeling. Her grandfather, a “white South African of Scottish origin”, is a mysterious presence in a complicated web of family relations, secrets, violence, and experiences of discrimination and exclusion. “What is remarkable about the coloured identity is its elusiveness,” writes Barbara Masekela (p. 118). Each blossom of the Jacaranda is unique, yet none is different in a way that matters.
June 2024
T.H. (Thomas Humphrey) Marshall (1893–1981) invented “social citizenship” as adjacent to civil and political citizenship. Even if the government was not able to turn every man into a gentleman, they would be responsible for providing everybody with a social modicum. In Citizenship and Social Class (1950), Marshall compared social politics and the welfare state with town planning. The purpose of town planning was not, Marshall claimed, that classes be abandoned, but that each class would find housing suitable to their needs and income. Marshall regarded town planning as the “architect of social inequality”! The City of Vienna has often found amiable solutions to dire problems of social inequality. None of them can be seen in the picture that shows imperial architecture in Vienna’s town center.
May 2024
One of Duguit’s inspirations, the French mathematician and sociologist Auguste Comte (1798–1857) published Système de Politique Positive in several volumes. Volume 1 (1875) explained how property rights have changed their meaning. During times of tyranny and feudalism, citizens needed their property protected from capricious government intervention. In modern times (such as Comte’s 19th century), property did not need protection but promotion as a tool of social cooperation. Comte feared that economic and social progress would be hampered by egoistic owners, who were unwilling to listen to the voice of the public best. This sculpture in the baroque garden Großsedlitz in Saxony reminds visitors of the cruel view held by past generations that the rape of one’s wife, daughter, or maid equals the free use of one’s property.
March-April 2024
One root of the idea of private property as an absolute right was the appropriation theory proposed by John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s property theory occupied vast parts of the second volume of Two Treatises of Government (1689). Its agrarian approach to property acquisition appeared rather romantic: A farmer drenched in his own sweat toils day in and day out to put food on the table (incidentally, he is also rewarded by the right to appropriate the land as his property). Locke’s bucolic view does not comment on slave ownership, plantation economies, King Cotton, exploitation, and early capitalism. In times of energy scarcity, the use of and property in air suddenly becomes vital for the survival of the carbon-deprived extraction capitalists. Will air ultimately also be parceled out and propertized?
February 2024
What blasphemy! Léon Duguit (1859–1928), an eminent professor of constitutional law from the University of Bordeaux, rejected the libertarian concept of private property as an absolute right of the landowner to exclude everybody else from the use of land. Rather, Duguit considered property as a social function. Conservative property theorists rejected Duguit as forceful as communist legal theorists. I took the picture of the prominent crucifix and the tiny penis in the Friedrichwerdersche Church in Berlin. Designed by Friedrich Carl Schinkel (1781–1841), the church after its profanation today houses a fascinating exhibition of 19th century sculptures.
January 2024
Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) examined the German ideology, a treatise that was published posthumously. The quote confirms the strategic significance of the “ideas of the ruling class”. It calls into question, however, how materialistic the theory of historic materialism really was supposed to be. How materialistic is a “ruling intellectual force”? The laundry surely is materialistic. It receives its aesthetic flamboyance through mere air that – as a forceful gale – shapes a gesture of resilience in the face of the third COVID19 wave. Air is lofty and soon will be gone. The air determines the mind: Die Luft bestimmt das Bewußtsein.
December 2023
South African lawyer Cormac Cullinan wrote the book Wild Law – A Manifesto for Earth Justice (2002). The poster selects a quote from Wild Law that refers to the complex relationship between property rights and corporations. Legal and political discourses predominantly treat the property rights of natural and legal persons equally. This is a huge mistake. Whereas property of natural persons is a guarantee of individual liberty, the property of companies is not a right but a social function (Duguit). Cullinan expressed the huge difference rather cleverly: Companies cannot love the land! The climate crisis always is exacerbated by the crisis of capital (that cannot love). Vast tracts of forest in North Rhine-Westphalia have been destroyed by a combination of arid summers, bark beetle infestation, and monoculture.
November 2023
| Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (b. 1947) called Justice for Animals (2022) “our common responsibility”. Nussbaum regarded humans as (illegitimate) dominators of animals. Elaborating on her earlier capabilities approach, she explained what needed to be done to restore the imbalance between human demands to use animals and the moral right of animals to exist. In a world where millions of children go hungry to bed each night and countries worldwide invest billions in an obscene arms race, the deliberation of animal rights may seem frivolous. Since “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (King), the trouble for animals cannot be considered separately from other trouble. The poisoned tree bears many different fruits. |
October 2023
In 1972, legal historian Christopher D. Stone (1937–2021) asked a question which guided 50 years of debate: “Should trees have standing?” (= Should trees have legal personhood and rights?) Stone answered in the affirmative, yet the environmental rights discourses have branched out: animal rights and dignity, land use ethics, rights of nature, tree rights, rights of rivers and oceans, ecological personhood, guardianship, and many more. Some of these discourses contradict each other directly (e.g., Leopold’s land ethic and Stone’s animal rights).
Animal rights often draw from similarities between human and non-human animals. It is easy to detect a human approach to motherhood in the photograph of monkeys in Kruger National Park. But what about other animals – venomous snakes and spiders, man-eating sharks, or SARS-CoV2?
September 2023
In the final chapter of A Sand County Almanac (1949), environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) presented his land ethic. The land ethic was an early (modern) version of biocentric environmental policy (not the human species, but Nature is its focus). Leopold regarded humans not as conquerors, but as citizens of the land community. In particular, he was critical of reducing the value of land to its economic exchange value and of ignoring the existence value of land. Because of the heavy weight he put on environmental values, Leopold was accused of “environmental fascism” by Tom Regan, an advocate for animal rights.
Depicted in the above poster: In the spring of 2021, during the third wave, this bee was not impressed by lockdown commands. She still kept social distance, though.
August 2023
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria (b. 1951), a Chilean surgeon, was President of Chile from 2006–2010 and 2014–2018. From 2018 through 2022, Bachelet served as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Her call to respect and protect human dignity and human rights in the struggle against COVID19 was widely ignored.
Depicted in the above poster: Visitors entering the Bielefeld museum of history admire an aerial photograph of the city located in the East of North Rhine-Westfalia. Dressed for the occasion (summer 2020), they are wearing face coverings and keep social distance.
July 2023.
In A Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963), civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968), explained why looking for everyday injustice is more important than the quest for ideal justice. The quote presents an ecological definition of injustice. Like pollutants in the air or water, through environmental cycles, find their way into human organs, injustice has the toxic power to contaminate social and political relationships even quite distant from the source of injustice. The sculpture Macht zu Lande (Power over Land) by Edmund von Hellmer decorates the Hofburg, the former Habsburg castle in Vienna-Central City. Depending on the viewer’s perspective, the face of the giant (a son of the Earth) appears to be devious, angry, vulnerable, violent, or frightened.
June 2023
The Austrian economist F.A. Hayek (1899–1992) hated planning. In his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, he defined planning in a way that many planners presumably find acceptable. Under this definition, planning connects the past, the presence, and the future by solving common problems “rationally” and with “foresight”. This definition can be misunderstood as saying that planners can escape social, economic, ecological, or political mortality (and Hayek feared that planners would give in to the temptations of collectivism and central planning).
The above poster shows a memento mori (= remember your mortality!) in the City of Höxter, North Rhine-Westphalia.