Urban communities are facing additional challenges in their community land buy outs.
The exceptional level of interest in areas of poverty is fundamental to understanding how to support urban community land sector. The fragmented nature of urban landholdings, with multiple owners and titles, makes data transparency even more important.
The priorities for urban land reform going forward need to reflect the interest in, and potential of, urban community landownership, and in land delivering more for the people of Scotland. There is a significant risk of community landownership being yet another policy applied from elsewhere to urban communities, not something which comes from the communities themselves. There is also a risk of land reform focusing on big urban policy issues like land assembly, or large Derelict Sites, which are important but in which most communities have little say, or stake, in. Community-led approaches should be fundamental to making more of Scotland’s urban land—we have the framework to do this, and the interest is there. Otherwise concentrated power, inequality and wealth extraction are built into the future.