Community Land Ownership, Housing and Sustainable Rural Communities

Land availability for affordable housing in rural areas is tied to competing discourses of sustainability that are set in the context of constructed idylls. This paper argues that the dominance of these myths owes to their support networks of power relations that govern the availability and use of key resources, amongst them land. The paper questions what happens to power relations when the land tenure regime changes and how this change impacts on the discourses of sustainability. It interprets the results of an initial investigation of community land buy-outs. The paper suggests that community purchase leads to a continuous renegotiation of power relations and to a rebalancingof the dimensions of sustainability. Community land trusts therefore emerge as sustainable models for tackling the question of land availability.