Land commodification : a structural barrier to degrowth transition

![CDATA[The willingness of politicians or business to acknowledge the necessity of a degrowth transition is scarce to non-existent (Rickters & Siemoneit, 2019). In response to this, there is broad support within the degrowth movement for the notion that a degrowth society will have to emerge from the grassroots up (see D’Alisa et al., 2015). However, serious doubts can also be levelled against such a sociocultural groundswell (Frankel, 2018; Sanne, 2002). While the degrowth movement has been explicit about the degree of ecological overshoot associated with perpetual growth, overall, certain politico- economic barriers to degrowth transition, that are faced by this potential groundswell, have not been well addressed in the literature (Strunz & Schindler, 2018; de Jesus & Mendonça, 2018). To address this gap in degrowth transition scholarship, this chapter demonstrates the way in which, for ordinary people expected to pursue a degrowth transition, costs associated with land and housing operate as a significant barrier to their involvement. As we will argue, these housing costs almost always function as a powerful economic determinant, locking people into sustained, but not sustainable, market participation. Our contribution to the literature is to analyse this terrain, exploring the way in which land privatisation (land enclosure being capitalism’s inaugural step) instigated and now continues to compel long-term participation in an unsustainable growth economy. The chapter concludes by exploring one way in which this structural obstacle to degrowth transition could be addressed. We propose an innovative public housing policy approach coupled with a ‘participation income - an approach that we argue could create a politically palatable urban commons pathway to degrowth.]]