Nada Moumtaz, Assistant Professor, Ohio State, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures (NELC) & Comparative Studies, will give the lecture "Beyond Profit? Beirut’s Inalienable Land Trusts under a Private Property Regime."
The origin of the global financial crisis in the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the increasing exclusion of most city-dwellers from access to affordable housing has brought to the fore the dramatic effects of the domination of the exchange value of land and housing stock, used as commodities to generate profit, over their use-value as shelters. This has driven many to think of different models of property in order to restrict speculation and to provide shelter, advancing particularly land trusts as an alternative. This paper analyzes the operation of a kind of land trust in Beirut, Lebanon in order to show how such inalienables operate under a private property regime and to consider the viability of the alternatives they can provide.
