Private Land Ownership in a Colonial Town

R oAPID areal expansion has been an outstanding feature of western cities in recent decades; particularly during the last 50 or 60 years cities have broken from their former compact limits, and spread out into the surrounding countryside to absorb extensive tracts of once productive agricultural land. While the social and economic consequences of this mass suburbanization have been recognized to be momentous, and have therefore attracted much discussion, many aspects of the processes whereby this expansion comes about merit more sustained examination than they usually receive. For in this case as in many others, processes are as much determinants as reflections of the kind of change being effected. One process which almost invariably accompanies urban growth is change in the ownership of land. As a rule, in the conversion of land from rural to urban uses there is fragmentation of ownership, as what was once a large rural holding is transformed into an urban subdivision, characterized by multiple ownership in small plots. At this stage and this stage alone does the planner have a relatively free hand in the establishment of layout, and the shapes and sizes of individual plots. For once achieved, patterns of land fragmentation in urban areas are remarkably persistent. Regulations normally prevent further fragmentation that would bring plots below a certain size limit, and consolidation, the opposite process, is difficult to achieve without resorting to administrative powers of coercion. The difficulties of proceeding with plans for urban redevelopment in the face of fragmented ownership were well illustrated by the experiences of several European cities in post-war years, when some of them found their programs frustrated by lack of co-operation.' In Britain there is little doubt that one of the chief attractions of the new towns policy was precisely its cadastral simplicity. In the United States, government agencies have made use of powers of expropriation of urban land under redevelopment programs only because the evils of obsolescence were so obvious and the remedies so 1 P. George: Problemes geographiques de la reconstruction et de l'anenagement des villes en Europe occidentale depuis 1945; Annales de Ge'ographie, No. 371, January, 1960, pp. 2-14

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