Community Land Ownership: Rural and Urban
Prior to joining SRUC's Rural Policy Centre I led a 3 year action research project to deliver an urban community landownership enabling hub for Community Land Scotland. The project is now complete, and a recent event sharing our learning provided me the opportunity to reflect on that work and on my current research on rural Scotland (such as long term impacts of community landownership or community wealth building, as part of the Scottish Government's Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services (RESAS) Strategic Research Programme 2022-27).
The aim of the community ownership enabling hub was to accelerate urban community landownership and land reform. Scottish community landownership is a unique model globally, developed over 30 years in rural Scotland. The rights and supports for community landownership were limited to rural areas until 2015 when the geographic restriction was removed, effectively rolling out the model to all of Scotland.
Scotland's 21st century model for community landownership is a rural innovation. It arose from a range of rural factors, including (but not limited to) high levels of landownership concentration, lack of infrastructure, a tradition of "self-help", a well-established community sector, and a number of land commonage practices such as crofting and common grazings, common good land, and historic community landownership (like Stornoway Estate being gifted to the people of Stornoway in 1923). The initial buyouts for the contemporary wave of community landownership occurred in the 1990s, before the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the 2003 Land Reform Act (as amended) codified the model. In the past 25 years there has been consistent Scottish Government support for community landownership, which in 2022 had led to 754 purchases by 505 communities.
The application of the community landownership model across Scotland is a rural community solution applied to new contexts. The experiences of urban communities using land rights and supports provide important learning on the expansion of the Scottish community ownership model. There is learning for Scotland and for others thinking of improving community-led land governance -- not least in England where the 2024 King's Speech committed to implementing a new Community Right to Buy (page 24).
The urban action research project evidenced that Glasgow communities were motivated by many of the same factors as rural communities: to do better for their communities, from making a derelict building useable, to creating a community garden, to providing housing, to taking ownership of a major estate or island in the public interest. It's idealistic, often difficult work, but is powerful stuff. Threads run through this of building personal and shared purpose, of power, of human connection, of helping others, and of creating good things for common use. It is notable that projects have been delivered by communities which others have been unable to tackle -- from building the electricity grid on Eigg, to proving the concept of a community-led high street at Mid Steeple Quarter in Dumfries, to delivering housing in areas suffering from depopulation like Raasay.
The challenges for urban community buy outs are similar to those faced by rural communities, such as volunteer burnout, lack of freely available land information, and the complexity of administrative processes. There are also some particularly urban challenges, such post-industrial dereliction, the scale of public body property sell offs, and landownership fragmentation. Community Land Scotland's urban action research project produced a range of policy recommendations, which should spur conversation and hopefully implementation.
The project also raises conceptual and policy questions about how we understand rural and urban areas. To take policy first -- how can community-level rural solutions be effectively championed, but also evolve to be used in other places with different contexts and needs? For example, one finding was that current funding structures lack the flexibility (and costs) needed to effectively support community-led approaches to vacant and derelict land. Do we have the appropriate balance of support between rural areas where projects and community organisations are more frequently well advanced, and new areas where the approach is applied in different contexts and with different needs? There are practical questions here, such as the expansion of the areas and population which can now access funding support, but no similar increase in the amount of funding available (rather, the Scottish Land Fund was recently cut). How do we create workable national policy for different contexts, such as a rural island and a city housing estate? This issue led to no urban criteria being including in the draft Land Reform Bill 2024, as the proposed criteria at consultation stage in (datazones) proved untenable.
Conceptually, these dynamics challenge our understanding of rural/urban divides. We should be cautious about thinking in rural/urban binaries, which are unhelpfully simplistic but endure. We can refine our policy metrics to better account for place nuance, such as in the NISRIE analytic framework on the geographic rural/urban classification. "Rural" is diverse in itself -- as is "urban". There is also much to be gained by considering shared dynamics across places, as a continuum from sparsely populated rural areas to city centre. We can think across places, such as by comparing contrasting cases working on similar goals, or how global processes act across these places. Extraction of land value on an international scale can occur on a rural estate as it does in a vacant city building. Flows of people across places are also a geographic pattern which characterises Scotland -- from depopulation, to repopulation, to rural homes and city opportunities. We could do with more transparent thinking about spaces in land reform policy, and across these spaces as well.
Carey Doyle
August 2024
Photo: by author - Viewpark Conservation Group, the largest "urban" buyout of 170 acres in North Lanarkshire