Law Commons^™

It's Been A Long Time Coming: A Short Manifesto For Urgently Needed Change In Land Use Law & Regulation, Colin Crawford

Publications

Pandemic illnesses from Ebola and HIV to COVID-19, the hastening consequences for land and the environment of climate change, and global protests over racial and social inequity in the wake of brutal police killings in the United States, all demand that we re-examine and rethink some land use basics. Therefore, in what follows, I will briefly highlight five areas of land use orthodoxy that I suggest the current historical moment demands we revisit. I will, furthermore, try to do so in the spirit of Julian Juergensmeyer and his work, pushing and questioning, seeking for new alternatives.

My five-part list for …

A Comparative Consideration Of Development Charges In Cape Town, Colin Crawford, Julian C. Juergensmeyer

Publications

This article, will look at the relatively new Cape Town development charge initiative in a comparative perspective. Part I will discuss the U.S. experience with development charges, including examples both effective and less so. The aim in Part I will be to demonstrate the achievements and shortcomings of development charges - or impact fees, as they are most commonly called in the U.S. - as utilized in the U.S., which was an early adopter of such practices globally. Part I will also suggest areas in which Cape Town practitioners (of whatever kind, whether lawyers, urban planners, engineers and so on) …

Density, Affordable Housing And Social Inclusion: Modest Proposal For Cape Town, Colin Crawford

Publications

What I would like to offer in this short article are some thoughts about ways Cape Town might benefit from lessons in the United States' long and still continuing struggle with racially segregated housing and to do so by promoting strategies that are not only inclusionary in aim but also more environmentally sustainable if developed properly. I do this in part from the conviction that this is a benefit of any comparative legal scholarship - to suggest different ways of looking at problems. In this, I will particularly examine density-focused incentives. Indeed, incentive-based practices, it seems to me, might have …

Social Function And Value Capture: Do They Or Should They Have A Role To Play In Polish Land Development Regulation, Colin Crawford, Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer, Dawid Sześciło

Publications

Following the introductory Part I, in Part II, two of the three authors here, both U.S. law professors, seek to identify some conceptual and practical legal tools for a more orderly and balanced land use development in the Warsaw metropolitan region, one that promotes not just economic and industrial growth but one that also serves medium- and longer-term social and environmental interests as well. Part III, written by the third author – a Polish law professor, will evaluate the prospects for, as well as the challenges and impediments to, implementing these legal tools in the Polish context. Finally, in Part …

Redefining And Analyzing Development And The Role And Rule Of Law, Colin Crawford

Publications

This article introduces a series of articles prepared in connection with an April 2015 conference jointly sponsored by the Law & Development Institute and the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University Law School. The introduction first surveys the uncertain and chaotic terrain of current and competing definitions of development and then introduces the articles in this special volume, identifying common themes and differences. In the process, the introduction suggests, law and development studies present great promise to provide greater coherence to development studies and practice going ahead, providing the approach is pluralist and inclusive.

Order, Progress And Carioca Environments: A Preface To Study Space V, Colin Crawford

Publications

Study Space is on ongoing series of field seminars designed to allow faculty and senior graduate students from multiple disciplines, with the center of gravity in law, to "evaluate human habitats and habits in the 21st century." The fifth iteration of this series, which I started while the co-director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth at Georgia State University College of Law, in Atlanta, took place from July 11-18, 2010. Participants, who included professors and senior graduate students in anthropology, law, philosophy, political science and sociology, came from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala and the United States. …

Our Bandit Future - Cities, Shantytowns, And Climate Change Governance, Colin Crawford

Publications

This Article seeks, to begin to define a role for cities and their inhabitants in climate change governance. Part I argues that if we fail to take into account global urbanization and its defining characteristics, namely extreme squalor and associated social ills, as a central feature of climate change policy, we face, as a Rio de Janeiro taxi driver said to me during the hot, dry, violent winter of 2006 in that city, 13 "urn futuro bandido," literally "a bandit future." That is, we face a future where cities, the places where most of the world's population lives, will experience …

Foreword And Acknowledgments: About The Study Space Project, Colin Crawford

Publications

Study Space: Evaluations of Human Habitats and Habits in the 21st Century, is an intensive series of workshops, held at diverse locations around the world, the goal of which is to acquire a deeper understanding of the legal, policy and human challenges posed by the global growth of megacities. Study Space intends, at various times and in different places, to provide a vehicle for progressive scholars and graduate students from varied backgrounds and disciplines to study, learn and seek to understand experientially this trend in all of its implications - for identity and self-determination, for participatory democracy, for equality and …

Why A Conference On Redevelopment, And Why Now, Colin Crawford

Publications

When the Center for the Comparative Study of Metropolitan Growth proposed the conference that produced the volume of essays you have in your hand, it was our idea to bring together a diverse group of professionals - environmental and land use lawyers, land use planners and city officials, politicians and engineers to discuss the legal and policy issues concerning "redevelopment." That is, we were concerned, living as we do in the rapidly changing and growing metropolitan area of Atlanta, to focus on the frequently exciting but also often tense and controversial area of redeveloping urban and suburban landscapes in ways …

Environmental Justice In Cuba: Capital Needs, Developing A Tourist Infrastructure, And Liberty Of Access To National Resources, Colin Crawford

Publications

First, I will describe the role of tourism in the current Cuban economy and identify the environmental concerns this development poses. In particular, this analysis will explore the environmental justice concerns of Cuba's emerging tourist infrastructure. Second, the article will examine both practical and theoretical efforts to include claims for freedom of access to environmental benefits under the environmental justice rubric. The article will both examine the relevance and lessons of those efforts for Cuba and do so with reference to notions of liberty rather than equality-the standard principle on which environmental justice claims are advanced. This section will conclude …

Los Angeles' Cornfield: An Old Blueprint For New Greenspace, Paul Stanton Kibel

Publications

This article begins with an historical survey of the Los Angeles River. Next, it considers the implications of a comprehensive 1930 park plan for Los Angeles. The 1930 plan was suppressed before it was published but is now being revived. The article then turns to the Cornfield, and reviews the activities and people associated with the site. The section that follows recounts the opposition to the Cornfield's reindustrialization, as well as the organizing and law suit that ultimately stopped the proposed manufacturing-warehouse project. The article goes on to deconstruct the deal that initially enabled the Trust for Public Land, and …

Necessity Makes The Frog Jump: Land-Use Planning And Urban Agriculture In Cuba, Colin Crawford

Publications

This Article addresses the land-use planning implications of Cuban urban organic agriculture. Part II begins by briefly placing the Cuban urban agricultural experience in an international context, noting that many of the successes, and potential threats to, Cuban urban agriculture share features similar to efforts in other countries both more and less developed than Cuba. In light of this context, Part II will then evaluate the implications of urban agriculture for Cuban land-use planning. To this end, Part II will identify the advantages of urban agriculture for urban living. In addition, Part II will also describe the Cuban effort to …

Uproar At Dancing Rabbit Creek: Battling Over Race, Class & The Environment, Colin Crawford

Publications

For the first five years of the 1990's, Noxubee County, Mississippi experienced a deeply divisive battle over the proposed siting there of one of the nation's biggest toxic waste dump and incineration facilities. Noxubee County, which is nearly 70% African-American, is also desperately poor. The fight over the proposed waste facility was in part a question of jobs versus environmental protection yet, as the selection below suggests, the waste fight was also influenced by long-standing animosities and social divisions-factors that, in my view, have been insufficiently appreciated by environmental justice activists and environmental lawyers alike.