Opening Up Ownership: Community Belonging, Belongings and the Productive Life of Property

Drawing on empirical data and property theory, this paper explores the property structure of a free school and the work property performs there. Its organising principle is a tension between two school practices. On the one hand, the founder and present members stress the importance of individual ownership; at the same time the school’s property regime involves property-limitation rules, a dispersal of rights, collective forms of property, and cross-cutting, pluralized sites of institutional recognition. In exploring how this tension is manifested through property’s work, the paper focuses on property’s contribution to a variegated social, at the school, analysed in terms of personal, civic and boundary relations. With belonging treated as the central component of property, rather than exclusion or control, ways of understanding how property works shift. In particular, the paper revisits claims regarding property’s constitutive or formative power.