Academic literature on the topic 'Land settlement – Government policy – Zimbabwe'

This chapter examines the politics of American expansion into the Southwest, focusing on how some racist politicians promoted manifest destiny while others opposed expansion. The chapter first takes a look at Mexico's land policy and its attempt to design its settlement policies in a way that copied the United States. It shows how Mexico struggled to assert national authority over its states and territories, promoting a federated structure that empowered the states to control their own land policies. Many of those territories, in turn, committed themselves to land policies that were at odds with those of the central government. The chapter proceeds by discussing U.S. efforts to acquire territory from Latin America, including Cuba and the Dominican Republic, before concluding with an analysis of the politics of the battle to incorporate New Mexico Territory as a state.

From the modern settlement of the southern Yucatán peninsular region to the present, smallholder farmers have followed a system of cultivation variously labeled swidden, slash-and-burn, or shifting within agricultural typologies (Watters 1971; but see Denevan 1992), and known as milpa in the Yucatán and Maya lowlands. Milpa cultivation has been so pervasive historically and geographically throughout the peninsula and the subject of such an extensive literature, that its description is only briefly reviewed here. Understanding the character and dynamics of this system of cultivation, including its long-term prognosis for continued use within the development of the region, is essential for understanding land changes and modeling them, although recent changes in cropping strategies portend the emergence of a ‘new’ kind of milpa. Swidden cultivation in the region, as elsewhere in Middle America, is invariably undertaken as an outfield activity—located at some distance from the farmstead—and is accompanied by small but complex housegardens or solares adjacent to and surrounding the house (e.g. Killion 1992; but see Gómez-Pompa 1987). The house-garden not only provides shade for the abode, it provides fruits, nuts, medicinal and ornamental plants, and a place for cropping experiments (Keys 1999). The extent and elaboration of house-gardens in the southern Yucatán peninsular region appears to be tied to the length of residency and, perhaps, ethnicity of the resident. Maya people, for example, tend to maintain large and elaborate solares. House-gardens tend to be smaller, even unrecognizable to the untrained eye, in the few densely settled communities in the region (e.g. Xpujil). As these gardens are not yet a central element of the broader dynamic of land change in the region, they are not given further attention here. The outfield or swidden supplies maize (Zea mays L.), planted in several varieties and serving as the consumption staple. Depending on the household, some portion of the maize crop may be sold. This ‘dual’ production function has been part of swidden in the region at least since the opening of Highway 186, reflecting government policy promoting commercial maize production (Ch. 7) and the abundant land awarded to individual ejidatarios at that time.

Of all the livelihoods made possible by land development, Cory Breternitz’s job was one of the more peculiar. He was paid to do archaeological excavations by people who hoped he would find nothing of interest. His Phoenix-based firm was one of many private archaeology firms that sprang up in response to legislation (the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970) designed to protect cultural resources such as prehistoric artifacts or remains. These laws require government agencies and private developers to hire historians and archaeologists to survey sites and inventory the results before they start building. At the height of the Arizona housing boom, Breternitz, who had previously worked for the Navajo Nation for more than twenty years, spent much of his time on the urban fringe, sifting through desert soil, looking for evidence of Hohokam settlement before the bulldozers “scraped the desert clean” and the construction crews moved in with chipboard, two-by-fours, and stucco to throw up a brown-tiled subdivision. If Breternitz uncovered a prehistoric structure, even a hamlet, it was still the developer’s prerogative to plough it under. “The United States,” he explained, “is different than most countries in the world in that private property is sacred, and the government cannot tell you what to do with it. In places like England, historic properties on your land belong to the Crown, and whatever you find—like a hoard of medieval coins—belongs to the government. In the U.S. if you find a ruin on your land, it belongs to you and you can bulldoze it or sell the artifacts.” Some of the developers he worked for might decide to preserve his discoveries and have them curated on-site by the state so that they could be promoted as an attractive sales feature to add value to the development. But ultimately, he reported, most of them simply “want their clearance, or their permits, to move forward with their projects and make money.” Human remains are the exception to this rule, since private ownership of these is prohibited by federal and Arizona law.

In Latin American cities informal settlements and insecure land tenure are the result of an exclusionary planning and urban management system which fails to provide legal and secure housing for lower-income groups. Against this backdrop, the State implemented land-title and urban regulatory policies, in order to improve the housing conditions of these neighbourhoods and integrate their residents into the legal regime. This paper proposes to address the conflicts implied in the processes of urbanization and regularization of the villas of the city of Buenos Aires during the first government of