Digital Commons Network^™

Palm Papers, Nicole Rothwell

Capstones

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) came into possession of a secret dataset of property owners of the Palm Islands, the elite high-end artificial islands on the coast of Dubai.

With over 250 neighborhoods on Dubai’s waterfront, a group of journalists around the world has been investigating who these individuals are that can afford the posh and pricey real estate. While most fall into the uber-rich category, some also have corrupt to criminal backgrounds leading to questions such as if the Palm Islands are truly a real-estate paradise, or instead a refuge for the corrupt.

The task for …

Urbanization, Land Rights And Development: A Case Study Of Waterfront Communities In Lagos, Nigeria., Gideon Olaniyi Omoniyi

Master's Theses

The aim of this study is to examine the root causes of forced evictions and displacement through the current urbanization process in Lagos, Nigeria. My particular attention is devoted to the legal complexities and how ethnolinguistic identities shape land laws, influence land tenure, and construct urban citizenship. Through this process, competing claims to land ownership provide fertile ground for forced evictions and displacement. Existing scholars suggest that poor urban residents lack rights to stay in their neighborhoods, while a powerful capitalist class has emerged and dispossessed the poor from their lands. Yet these existing approaches derived from the neoclassical and …