Since the financial crash of 2008, housing has emerged as a central issue of a great many urban and rural spaces. In many major cities, practices of 'land banking' by developers, often involve hoarding unused and/or derelict housing stock until market conditions, availability of finance, building costs or the political context is conducive to developing the site. In the mean time, the property lies vacant, sometimes falling into states of disrepair and dereliction. The developer will often...
There are a wide variety of different critical responses to human rights, spanning over 250 years, from Olympe de Gouges’ feminist critique of the rights of men and Edmond Burke’s critique of abstract universalism; to the way the Haitian slave revolution shows the racial undertones of rights or Marx’s analysis of human rights as the rights of ‘egoistic man’. Increasingly after WWII, and particularly after the success of anticolonial struggle and US President Jimmy Carter’s new foreign policy,...