Property as an Asset of Resilience: Rethinking Ownership, Communities and Exclusion Through the Register of Resilience

Abstract

This article sets out a new conception of ‘property as an asset of resilience’. Building on Fineman’s emphasis on ‘webs’ of resilience, and applying insights from Actor-Network Theory and Resilient Property Theory, we examine how the rhetorical claims asserted by owners and non-owners, individually and collectively, and the ways that law recognizes and endorses those claims, affect the production of property-as-resilience. Applying Fineman’s framework, we argue that the ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ of human vulnerability is revealed by the necessary and inevitable relationship we have with land, housing and place. Everyone—including homeless people—must ‘be’ somewhere (embodiment); however, it is our ability to access ‘assets of resilience’ through our social embeddedness in institutional structures and relationships that mitigates (or not) our experience and life opportunities. In this article we analyze the nature of real property as an asset of resilience, the consequences of exclusionary concepts of ownership for how resilience is allocated, and the implications for how we think and talk about ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in property theories and property law. We consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through the protection and enforcement of private property rights and official narratives about the nature of private property; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their own networks of resilience.

1 Introduction

The ability to ‘hang a sign’ that signals the owner’s right to exclude is a primary trope in private property law.¹ Property law’s ‘information theories’ conceptualize these signs as unidirectional communications from owners to the rest of the world—an instruction to ‘keep out!’ or shout ‘hands off, it’s mine’—and identify their purpose as to enable coordinated interactions between people (owners and non-owners) with respect to property. Information theorists argue that property transactions and respect for private property require clear and simple signals about how others should behave with regard to owners’ property,² and that property ‘works’ as a social ordering system: “by providing clear signals recognizable to all the world about how to behave with respect to things owned by others.”³ Merrill and Smith argued the ‘moral’ force of private property is anchored in the human instinct to exclude. In this frame, the world is divided into two populations: ‘owners’ as rights-bearers; and the rest of the world as duty-bearers. Information theories posit that, by structuring property law in ways that produce ‘simple signals’ about ownership, the rest-of-the-world can recognize, understand and respect the (exclusionary) rights of owners.

In one sense, the simplification of property conflicts to binary interactions between owners and outsiders is an inherent feature of the scaled production of law, which reduces complex and unique fact patterns to simplified, legible conceptual terms. It sorts, groups and categorizes ‘things, people and qualities in terms of relative degrees of elevation or centrality’,⁴ for example, by recognizing ‘ownership’ as a de jure right with hierarchical priority over ‘non-ownership’, and conferring special standing on ‘owners’ in relationship to land through constitutional and legal protections.⁵ Another dimension of the simplification of property signals to a communication between the owner and the ‘rest of the world’ is the inference that (legally constituted) property communications flow directly between owners and non-owners, with little direct consideration of the role of the state. Resilient Property Theory⁶ offers an alternative perspective, revealing the role of the state in enabling, endorsing and enforcing the messages embedded in these communications. By applying insights from Resilient Property Theory, we can reflect on how property communications are leveraged to support the resilience needs of owners, non-owner outsiders, and aggregated interests in neighbourhoods and communities. In doing so, we observe that property claims operate on a register of resilience that interacts with the resilience needs of the state, and that this frames the state’s ability to see and respond to the resilience needs of owners and outsiders.

The owner’s ability to hang a sign on property that reads “keep out” asserts a moral right or entitlement to exclude others. It functions as a form of aesthetic signaling: simplifying and rhetorically upscaling contextualized, on-the-ground experience to a simplified register of ‘exclusion’. Information property theories, and moral property rights-based theories that define ‘exclusion’ as the ‘essence’ of property ownership and property law⁷ reinforce these claims. Models of property relations that define ‘exclusion’ as the essence of property are challenged by pluralist and progressive property theories, which seek to open up broader conversations about the values and relationships that property supports, the outcomes it produces, and whether or not these amount to a ‘good enough’ social order. Yet, as Van der Walt observed: “…the right to exclude still tends to dominate the theoretical discussion about property. According to the information theorists, the property system pivots on the right to exclude because that exclusion consolidates a large number of powers in one property owner.⁸

In this article we explore the semiotics of ‘exclusion’ in property practices. Using Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory and Resilient Property Theory (RPT), we re-imagine the concept of exclusion through the prism of ‘property as an asset of resilience’. Building on Fineman’s account of the ‘webs’ of resilience that human subjects are embedded within, and applying insights from Actor-Network Theory, we examine how the rhetorical claims asserted by owners, both individually and collectively along exclusionary and inclusionary registers, affect the production of, and access to, networks of property-as-resilience. By applying Fineman’s concept of ‘assets of resilience’ to discourses of property and ownership, we demonstrate how property’s putatively oppositional narratives and norms of ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ reflect a structured bifurcation of the fundamental and universal human claim to property as an asset of ‘resilience’. For exclusionary-insiders and excluded-outsiders alike, the advancement of claims to property, housing and home emanate from the same rootstock: the human need to mitigate their inevitable embodied vulnerability within the sheltering ambit of property’s resilience.

This fundamental unity of purpose is concealed behind legal structuring techniques that define the claims of owner-insiders through the language of legitimacy and entitlement; and non-owning-outsiders through the language of deviance and exclusion. This labelling practice has a polarizing effect: it tends to emphasize difference and opposition between identity groups (owners and non-owners), rather than recognizing the universal nature of human vulnerability and the universal human need to shore up our vulnerabilities through the social institution of (private) property. The ‘embodiment’ and ‘embeddedness’ of human vulnerability is revealed by the necessary and inevitable relationship we have with land, housing and place. Everyone—including homeless people—must ‘be’ somewhere (embodiment); however, it is our ability to access ‘assets of resilience’ through our social embeddedness in institutional structures and relationships that mitigates (or not) our experience and life opportunities. Applying Fineman’s insights to reflect on the nature of property and the articulation and assertion of property claims, we develop a more realistic understanding of property as ‘networks of resilience’. Finally, we consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through the protection and enforcement of private property rights and official narratives about the nature of private property; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their own networks of resilience.

2 Vulnerability Theory and ‘Assets of Resilience’

Fineman’s Vulnerability Theory is rooted in her rejection of the idealized, imagined “autonomous and independent subject asserted in the liberal tradition”.⁹ The alternative model she advances anchors legal subjectivity in the inherent, universal and constant human vulnerability of “real-life subjects”.¹⁰ Fineman argues that this “vulnerable subject”, who is “embodied and embedded”,¹¹ is: “[f]ar more representative of actual lived experience and the human condition… [and therefore] should be at the center of our political and theoretical endeavors.”¹² The embodied characteristics of the vulnerable legal subject reflect the material realities of ‘bodily vulnerability’—the flesh-and-blood vulnerability that: “…is apparent at the beginning of life when we were totally dependent on others for our survival”¹³; and which remains a constant feature of our human experience. Fineman describes our ability to mitigate this embodied vulnerability as changing over time and across the life course: “embodying different needs and abilities, and often dependent upon others at various stages of normal development”.¹⁴ Nevertheless, she argues that our state of constant embodiment means that: “…there is no position of invulnerability at any stage. Rather, individuals have different degrees of resilience, which are found in the accumulation of resources that mediate, compensate, or alleviate our vulnerability to harm and injury as embodied beings.”¹⁵ Fineman deploys the concept of ‘resilience’ to articulate how universal ‘flesh-and-blood’ vulnerability is mitigated and managed: by the accumulation, access to or acquisition of resources¹⁶ that enable adaptation, amelioration, compensation, or containment of our vulnerability.

Since vulnerability is understood as an inevitable and constant characteristic of the human condition, Fineman’s vulnerability theory demands that we resist the habit of defining the “vulnerability” of one claimant in counterpoint to the presumed “invulnerability” of another. Because it resists labelling individuals as ‘vulnerable’ or ‘not vulnerable’ it reminds us to avoid conferring normatively loaded-up identities onto legal subjects or populations (for example, victim/aggressor; owner/trespasser and so on). Fineman re-locates the underpinning source of difference between people’s abilities to navigate opportunities and support, gaps and pitfalls, away from the idea that some people are more or less vulnerable than others. Instead, Vulnerability Theory focuses on differences in people’s opportunities to accumulate and access ‘assets of resilience’ through their interactions with social institutions. These assets of resilience are comprised of ‘background resilience’ that is accumulated over time; and resilience that is allocated by state actors or agencies to mitigate vulnerability in moments of crisis.

A second trope of Fineman’s theory is embeddedness. Each individual’s experience of vulnerability is structured through their social embeddedness in the institutional structures and relationships that provide resilience.¹⁷ Fineman explained that:

“Even before the moment of birth, human beings are embedded in webs of economic, cultural, political, and social relationships and institutions. We are dependent on those relationships and institutions because they support and sustain us. They are the legitimate means through which we can gain the assets or resources necessary to mediate, negotiate, or cope with our human vulnerability. While there is no position of invulnerability, these relationships and institutions provide us with resilience. It is our reservoir of resilience that will determine whether we can not only persevere but be confident enough to take risks or recognize and choose among options and opportunities as they arise over the life course.”¹⁸

While vulnerability is characterized as constant and universal, Fineman argued that: “…resilience is particular, found in the assets or resources an individual accumulates and dispenses over the course of a lifetime and through interaction with and access to society’s institutions.”¹⁹ Through this move, vulnerability theory shifted the implications of legal subjectivity away from the individual and onto the institutions that create, enable, provide, and protect the “assets” of resilience, including the physical and material, social and relational, environmental and existential capabilities to weather misfortune and disaster, and opportunity to avail ourselves of good fortune when it arises.

Vulnerability Theory centers the institutions that produce and provide resilience to mitigate our vulnerabilities because it is these institutional structures and relationships, in which vulnerable subjects are ‘embedded.’ That embeddedness determines each individual’s particular experience of vulnerability, through the quality and quantity of resources (resilience) that we inherit, accumulate or are capable of accessing in any given moment.²⁰ Fineman argued that: “[w]e are not born resilient; it is produced over time and within state-created institutions and in social, political, and economic relationships.”²¹ Finally, Fineman highlighted the central role of ‘the state’ in creating and sustaining the economic (e.g., the market), social (e.g., the family), legal (e.g., constitutions) and political (government) institutions that produce and allocate resilience. Societal institutions of resilience are created, maintained and regulated through law; and through this relationship, law confers legitimacy on their operation and power over individuals.²² For example, the a priori respect for ownership that is built into liberal legal systems is central to the ways that resilience is allocated to some individuals in preference others.

The embodiment and embeddedness of human vulnerability is revealed by the observation that humans have a necessary and inevitable relationship with land, housing and place: that everyone, even people who are homeless, must be somewhere, and so exist in relation to land and housing. Access to land and housing is typically regulated through private property rules, the creation and enforcement of which reflects the state’s role in governing land relationships, as well as the rhetorical power that land claims have over social institutions. Building on Fineman’s focus on ‘assets of resilience’, in this article we analyze the nature of real property as an asset of resilience, in the context of how we think and talk about ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ in property theories and property law. We consider the roles that states perform in the allocation of property as an asset of resilience: both directly, through enduring support for property systems, property law and the protection and enforcement of private property rights; and indirectly, as owners leverage the hinterland of privilege extended to ‘ownership’ and owners to deepen their networks of resilience.

3 Property, Scale and Identity

The signals that property owners send about their property produce forms of discourse within property and ownership systems. Signs posted on land that read “No Trespassing” or “Keep Out” are generally endorsed in society. This is evident in the respect given to these signals by the public at large and their mass production and widespread availability in hardware stores. As a discursive practice, these signals represent a form of resilience conferred on owners of land. They reflect the normative expectations of so-called ‘rights to exclude’, and shape general social expectations of the powers of owners to communicate these expectations with confidence that they are endorsed by law. In short, these signals communicate what owners expect law to do in the face of unwanted intrusions on their land.

These discursive signals also reflect how law scales down disputes around trespass as binary between owners and outsiders. Law generally, and property law specifically, are scaled exercises that reduce the complexity of empirical problems by structuring and defining conflicts in relationship to individuals, things, and claims.²³ Understood as a production of the state, property law reveals how states use scale to perceive, prioritize and resolve collective problems.²⁴ Property law simplifies conflicts by imposing structured rules on messy real-life problems. Crucially, the choices that are made in these simplification processes are not neutral artifacts of an uninterested state; rather they reveal the state’s own interests in the management of resources, including land and housing, as a source of its own self-seeking resilience claims. Individuals, communities, state actors and institutions send powerful signals about their relative claims to land and resources to audiences that include within-group insiders and out-of-group property outsiders. These communications seek to reflect, embody and advance the resilience of owners and neighborhoods and—to the extent that they are directly or indirectly endorsed and upheld by the state—the state’s own interests in the maintenance of the property system. The substantive content of the property law system that is produced through these processes reflects both how states perceive land and resource relationships vis-à-vis their own institutional interests, and how they perceive the relative positions of owner-insiders and non-owner-outsiders in relation to the state itself.

Law is scaled as a discursive practice in the ways that both insiders (for example, owners) and outsiders (non-owners) relay and validate claims.²⁵ Property law uses scale to re-produce complex and unique fact patterns in simplified, legible conceptual terms: for example, the recognition of ownership as a de jure²⁶ right with conceptual priority over de facto possession.²⁷ Law scales conflicts by creating hierarchies of actors, rights and claims.²⁸ Scale-making is inherently relational and comparative, often “conflating what is geographically, geopolitically, temporally, or morally ‘near’ while simultaneously distinguishing that nearness from that which is “far.”²⁹ Real property law similarly operates as a scaled hierarchy, by sorting, grouping, and categorizing: “things, people, and qualities in terms of relative degrees of elevation or centrality.”³⁰ For example, real property claims are usually organized around the identities assigned to the individuals who assert them:³¹ for example, ‘owners’ have special standing in relationship to land through both constitutional recognition and legal protections afforded to their claims; in contrast, depending on the detailed rules in place in each jurisdiction, ‘trespassers’ may or may not accrue or attract resilience in relation to their property claims. These categories create de facto hierarchies of interests:³² defining the actors and conferring a legally determinative property ‘identity’ based on their relationship to the land.³³

Our ‘property identities’ are implicated in our abilities to draw down on state-backed allocations of resilience to mitigate our inevitable human vulnerability. Competing claimants draw on different types of resources—economic, rhetorical or legal—in interacting and overlapping ways, to support their claims to property resilience. Economic or physically measurable resources³⁴ include financial, physical, geographic, or time investments. Rhetorical or discursive resources³⁵ refer to the types of arguments that actors use to advance and validate their claims to legal protection. Hierarchical resources relate to the ordering of resources backed by either legal or rhetorical sources.³⁶ For example, the hinterland of constitutional or legal protections extended to ‘ownership’ and ‘owners’ are communicated through rhetorical and normative claims about private property rights, while specifically ordering the claims that owners and nonowners can assert through courts.³⁷

The relative position of claimants seeking access to resilience through property—whether they are property-insiders or property-outsiders³⁸—affects their ability to draw down on these three types of scalable resources. Law scales these resources by making them cognizable through entitlements that confer state-backed endorsement for individuals or groups to exercise control, for example, over access to land.³⁹ Ab initio allocations of de facto resources and de jure rights enable insider-owners to articulate their claims in ways that deploy their resilience-advantage over outsider claims. From the practical ‘self-help’ actions owners take to stake their claims, to the aggregation of assets of resilience in neighborhoods and communities, and the challenges that outsiders bring to advance their own claims to property as an asset of resilience, law forms an essential backdrop outlining the relative ease with which parties can access this form of resilience.

The state’s endorsement of different types of property claims, and its allocation of resources to support claim-making, shifts over time in response to the changing pressures felt by state actors. The use of criminal justice tools to protect private property—for example, through the criminalization of trespass—illustrates how the power of law can be ‘scaled up’ to increase the resilience that is directly afforded to owners by the state. Rhetorical claims are advanced to garner political and public support for the extension of criminal sanctions in respect of property.⁴⁰ When states criminalize particular behaviors in respect of property—for example, by conferring criminal sanction on certain types of trespass—the narratives advanced to justify such steps are often framed in response to specific pressures, crises or moral panics about the ‘sanctity of private property’ or the ‘public order threat’ putatively posed by property outsiders. Dialectal in nature, the ‘defining up’ of offences re-interprets the language of property as well as imbuing property terms with greater or different significance than they had before.⁴¹

The rhetorical claims that animate property theories—and, in turn, contemporary property politics—also draw on the hinterland of the stories we tell about how property rights emerged in our societies.⁴² These narratives are challenged through critical discourses of power that offer alternative accounts of property relations and resilience. For example, Lockean accounts of property, based in narratives of ‘first possession’ in the mythical ‘blank canvas’ of the ‘New World’, with the labour of the euphemistic ‘first possessor’,⁴³ have been challenged in post-colonial accounts of property that foreground the prior occupation of indigenous people who were deemed “culturally different or morally inferior”.⁴⁴ Narratives that advance absolutist accounts of the sanctity of private property rights are challenged by social movements (for example, the Occupy movement), highlighting the consequences of property rights absolutism for excluded populations and the impacts of socio-economic inequality for political instability.

While insider-owners lay claim to state-backed allocations of resilience on the basis of ownership’s exclusionary norms; advocacy for property outsiders highlights the injustice of exclusion from essential assets of resilience or advances inclusionary claims (for example, through ‘right to housing’ discourses). The oppositional tropes of ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ also compete for rhetorical power in property discourses and debates. Philosophical theories of property⁴⁵ are often structured around bifurcated frames that reflect underpinning political commitments along an inclusion–exclusion, left–right, community-liberty, public interest-private rights spectrum. Through these frameworks, adversarial arguments are advanced on behalf of competing claimants to property’s putatively rivalrous resources.

The binary structure of private property discourse has significant implications for property scholarship. The use of binary frames potentially reinforces the neoliberal world-view, which—rhetorically at least—relies on these distinctions to position private power, embodied in “the market,” as the source of individual freedom and wealth maximization. Simultaneously, public power, embodied in “the State” is characterized as “oppressive, inefficient and [to] be restrained and limited at all costs.”⁴⁶ These oppositional structures—epitomized in the bifurcation of legal realism into law-and-society on the left and law-and-economics on the right—has a tendency to generate politically polarized analyses, with all the risks and perils that follow when scholarly discourse splits into “a fairly distinct right and left that mostly talk past each other…”.⁴⁷

Complex problems involving multiple layered and intersecting choices are rendered ‘legible’⁴⁸ using simplified, oppositional, binary tropes. For example, the ‘property/sovereignty’ binary⁴⁹ posits a zero-sum, rivalrous contest between liberal commitments to individual freedom and the private sovereignty of property rights on the one hand, and the role of state institutions, including law, in allocating resilience on the other. This is problematic because the anchoring of property theories in distinct and competing frames runs the risk that property problem-solving collapses into rhetorical deadlock. Property problems are positioned either as simple allocations of (or entitlements to) resources to owners, and therefore the rules relating to those disputes should also be simple and clear to ensure that audiences understand these (information theories). Competing for airspace in this property universe are more complex, contextualized conversations about the bases on which access to property resources should be governed in the interests of society as a whole (progressive theories). As we will demonstrate in the sections that follow, both accounts are underpinned by the fundamental imperative of property as networked resilience. By recognizing this common rootstock, and its meanings in the universality of human experience, we argue that the concept of property as an asset of resilience opens up new avenues for understanding common ground between competing ideas about property.

4 Property as Networks of Resilience

The signs and signals that communicate owners’ expectations with respect to the state’s endorsement of their resilience needs reflect one set of pressures states face in respect of competing resilience needs linked to land and housing. Information theories read the signals owners send in binary terms: as a statement to the world at large that the owner’s resilience needs must be respected. Yet, states, and other stakeholders, are also audiences to other property communications, expressing other resilience needs linked to shared and sustainable access to land resources. In mediating these competing resilience claims, the state’s role is not passive (refereeing disputes from a putatively ‘neutral’ position) but active. Crucially, through the lens of Resilient Property Theory, the state’s role in these disputes is framed by the state’s own stake in the property and housing systems, which have a recursive effect on the state’s own resilience—manifest in economic accumulation and political legitimacy.⁵⁰ RPT acknowledges that, when states allocate resilience, whether this is by endorsing communications by owners or non-owners, this is both ‘other-regarding’ (promoting the interests of the owners or non-owners) and ‘self-regarding’ (revealing and advancing the interest of the state).

Through this lens, we recognize the state’s own resilience stake in non-owner claims for access to the property resources of shelter, housing and home. Demands on the state to mitigate the physical embodiment of the vulnerable legal subject are not bounded by justiciable positive obligations on the state but include the broader socio-political contexts in which claims to access housing and home are expressed. A state’s legal obligations may be set out in national constitutions (for example, in South Africa, that ‘Everyone has the right to have access to adequate housing’)⁵¹ or under international rights instruments that define the role and responsibilities of states in respect of the ‘right to housing’ (i.e., Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)),⁵² although legal obligations on states to advance the right to housing have been ‘notoriously underachieved.’⁵³ The complexity of these challenges is reflected in the pressures applied through legal and adjudicatory methods to hold states to these housing commitments. Human rights to housing claims place new pressures on states to recognize not only shelter, but also geographic suitability, fair access to housing resources, the psychic value of home in the context of social relationships, and the suitability of housing to the needs and demands of individuals. These demands are raised in the context of legal systems that give presumptive preferences to property claims by owners reflected in property communications, and state endorsement of those property communications that seemingly inoculate owners against further demands on their property expectations. Political and social movements that foreground the failures of the state to meet the housing resilience needs of citizens, or the collective resilience needs of sustainable land use, highlight the recursive impact of state responses to property communications from both owners and non-owners for the state’s own resilience. In this section we focus on competing networked claims on property as an asset of resilience.

Progress towards the realization of collective housing resilience intersects with the governance of private property. These are often portrayed as competing, or even oppositional goals: between the inclusionary aims of housing resilience and the exclusionary rights of private property; between tenants (housing) and landlords (property); between excluded property outsiders and insider property-owning interests. Real property rights are attached to assets of resilience that remain fixed in place—both physically and legally. Our status in relation to property shapes our identities—in ways that may be wanted or unwanted: we are owners, tenants, homeless, squatters, investors, neighbors. The ‘fixedness’ of these identities is compounded by private property law’s commitment to the taken-for-granted assumption that property rights will be upheld. Underkuffler explained: “[t]he promise of property law, and its critical social function, is to protect what it identifies as ours. Whatever the distributional fairness or unfairness that may exist, whatever the vagaries of the moment, property law promises that entitlements will not change.”⁵⁴ Describing the ‘constitutional conundrum’ imbricated in the distribution of property-as-resilience, Underkuffler observed that: “[p]roperty is, by definition, the protection of the status quo; it cannot, of itself, answer the question of when there is a justified change in that status quo.”⁵⁵ Tacit acceptance of the claim that certainty and predictability are essential ‘property values’ reflects the perceived role of property law in locking things [or, assets of resilience] in place. This is operationalized by tagging outcomes to pre-existing rights, and by the self-fulfilling power of ‘ownership’.⁵⁶

John Law described how narrative and normative ‘hinterlands’ (like ownership/exclusion) create realities by constructing ‘standardized packages’ that shape our ‘choices’.”⁵⁷ The hinterland of ownership frames how property problems are understood, articulated and resolved using property law. In developing our analysis of property as an ‘asset of resilience’, we draw on Actor Network Theory to acknowledge the recursive relationship between embodied actors (owners, non-owners, the state) and the networks in which they are embedded (neighbourhoods, communities, social organisations, and institutions).⁵⁸ While actors and networks have their own agency, networks are produced from the actors that comprise them, and affect the agency of the actors within them.⁵⁹ Humans do not belong to single networks, but are embedded in multiple communities that mediate how they express their identities, and determine their ability to accumulate and accrue resilience.⁶⁰ Likewise, networks themselves interact not only with their members, but with other networks and other humans in seeking out and expressing opportunities to access resilience, as well as communicating resilience gaps and needs.⁶¹

One reason that we focus on this recursive perspective is that property law is a primary site for networks to assert, advance, advocate and accrue assets of resilience. From the physical proximity of neighboring property owners to abstract networks like markets, affinity interests, property taxpayers, and more, owners and non-owners are required to participate in various ‘propertized’ networks if their most fundamental resilience needs are to be met. These networks are structured by interests secured, created, endorsed and upheld under the property law system of the jurisdiction in which they are located. Within these networks, property performs different functions as an ‘asset of resilience’. For some, including city-level state actors and agencies,⁶² the property network provides a financial network of economic security with market value foregrounded within the register of resilience.⁶³ For others, property serves as a conduit for social relationships, building on geographic proximity to neighbors and neighborhoods, or the social proximity of shared economic status.⁶⁴

The legal recognition of property claims by the state confers legal resilience on certain (owner-insiders’) interests and on the networks to which they belong. While property insiders benefit from the resilience afforded by state recognition and enforcement of property rights, property outsiders (and their networks) articulate their resilience needs in terms of property or access claims. Whether inside the ambit of property’s protection or outside, the ability to mitigate our inevitable human vulnerability is shaped by state-backed allocations of resilience through property law; and the recursive, self-fulfilling and deepening impacts of the spaces these create for the production of ‘self-help’ resilience through embedded networks. In this way, networks of interest seek to access and accrue state-backed resilience. In doing so, their transactional interaction with the state may hold out an offer to shore up the state’s own resilience needs in the context of property systems.

5 Reflexive and Aesthetic Communications in Property

Neighborhood signs, like individual no-trespassing signs, rely on state-backed resilience claims. These claims represent the interests of collective owners around different forms of resilience embedded in the collective identity of the neighborhood, as well as the identity claims of individuals who live in the neighborhood. For example, in some neighborhoods, neighborhood rules prohibit the posting of individual signs by owners in public-facing view (for example, political signage) on the basis the collective resilience of neighborhood cohesion may be threatened by the assertion of individual owners’ political affiliations. In these neighborhoods, the individual’s expectation of entitlement to use property for political expression is subordinated to the collective identity needs of the community. Inferred in the acceptance of these rules is the owner’s adoption of the collective identity demands of the neighborhood as higher than his own individual needs to express his individual identity through his property. Other types of signs in neighborhood communities validate the collective identity of the neighborhood, whether that takes the form of community making, rule enforcement, or exclusion of outsiders. The neighborhood as a network actor draws on the validation of its members (as a network of property holders) as it asserts claims to govern through inclusion and/or exclusionary communications, to promote neighborhood resilience.

Networks articulate their claims through a range of insider and outsider communications. Individuals and networks communicate in ways that signal their relative positions as resilience asset-holders, and their experiences of, or anxieties about, resilience deficits. Reflexive communication is framed by internalized signals, rules, and social structures.⁶⁵ The inward-facing ‘cognitive’ dimension of reflexive communication is directed at the ‘self’—shaping self-identity according to the rules that have been internalized by the individual or within networks,⁶⁶ while ‘aesthetic’ communications interpret outside-information in relation to the self.⁶⁷ Cognitive and aesthetic communications send signals about access to and accumulations of property-based resilience between individuals⁶⁸ and networks,⁶⁹ as well as highlighting resilience deficits. Through these processes, they reflexively signal the resilience stores of both individuals and networks. For individuals, these signals or symbols are embedded in identities of self. Giddens described the identity of the self as:

“…a generic phenomenon [that] presumes reflexive awareness. It is what the individual is conscious “of” in terms of self-consciousness. Self-identity is not something that is just given, as a result of the continuities of the individual’s action-system, but something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual.”⁷⁰

This is reflected in the ways that individuals communicate—to themselves, within networks, and to the world at large⁷¹—their own resilience as property owners. For example, Davidson observed that, following the 2007 housing crisis, property shored up the concept of self through two modes: individuals saw themselves reflected in the property they owned, at the same time as they drew on their property assets and resilience to reinforce their sense of self.⁷²

The role of property in shoring up our sense of self is reinforced through symbols that communicate the interconnection between the property and the individual. In Conceptualizing Home, Fox O’Mahony described how acts such as the selection of interior décor reinforced the occupier’s sense of self as: “[t]hrough the investment of time and energy by the occupier[s] the house that the occupiers begin to dwell in become a home…”⁷³ People make and re-make their identities through their homes and home décor, including: the role of art and cultural representations in home ownership⁷⁴; the zoning of the home into particular functional (and sometimes gendered) areas⁷⁵; and the display of artifacts of individual and family life including awards, photographs, and the like.⁷⁶ This observation has also been made in relation to individuals who live in non-traditional housing. Occupiers in informal settlements, or even rough sleepers, embody their claims to ‘home’ through the objects they display.⁷⁷ The power of self, reflected in their homes, famously animated Suzette Kelo and Wilhemna Derry to oppose attempted takings of their homes by the state for the purposes of economic development in the totemic U.S. takings law case of Kelo v City of New London.⁷⁸

The communication of signals that deploy property or housing as an asset of resilience can also be outward looking, or aesthetic. The purpose of these ‘aesthetic’ signals is not primarily geared towards the self or self-identity, but to our social identities in the eyes of others. Gary Iseminger described ‘aesthetic communications’ as those that seek an appreciation.⁷⁹ Individual aesthetic resilience communicates to others the resilience that the individual or network has accrued through the ownership of property. Aesthetic resilience is not exclusively directed to outsiders and its objects can serve both reflexive and outward functions. For example, Winter’s work on the meaning of terracotta roofs as a symbol of wealth, power, and class in seventh century Italy illustrates how individuals used their power over the design of their homes to communicate perceptions of self to the outside world and, in doing so, reaffirm the owner’s own cognitive sense of self.⁸⁰ Damien le Bas described how members of the British-Traveller community use language and symbolic objects in home-settings to serve a similar function: communicating social-identities to both insiders and outsiders, while simultaneously reinforcing their self-identities.⁸¹

As individuals cognitively reflect on their own resilience needs, this is reflected in their behaviors. Sometimes these resilience-seeking behaviors are outwardly visible within the neighborhood, manifesting in aesthetic communications. For example, environmental norms have accrued powerful cognitive and aesthetic qualities within neighborhoods: cognitive, as owners embrace a norm of “doing their part”; while its aesthetic dimensions are evident as owners perform the role of participating in community recycling programs or installing solar panels on their home. While the norms of ownership impart a cognitive reflexive obligation, the outward facing self performs the act under the gaze of others. The owner’s aesthetic-reflexivity means they may become bound to repeat the act, not just because it has been cognitively embraced, but because the owner feels bound to embody these norms over time. These aesthetic communications enable owners to leverage their embeddedness within the neighborhood to articulate, assert and advance their resilience both as individuals and as part of the neighborhood-network.

Networked owners communicate their identities, and define the identity of the neighborhood-territory, in ways that are both constitutive of, and reflective of, their self- and social-identities: “…laying claim to a geographic area, marking it for identification, and defending it when necessary against others…”⁸² Signage performs an important role in the assertion of property identities by articulating aesthetically-reflexive and aesthetically-communicative positions. In some communities, homeowners and neighbors articulate their community identities through shared architectural standards that reinforce conformity and same-ness: their shared membership of an ‘in-group’.⁸³ To the extent that these signals are reflexive, they function as outward signs of conformity and cohesion to the network (the neighborhood). For instance, Joan Faber McAlister’s work on covenantal rhetoric described how neighborhood covenants use aesthetic rules and requirements of homogeneity to signal racial and class-based exclusionary norms.⁸⁴ Signage also plays an important role in the way communities accrue resilience through their identification as a group.⁸⁵ Signage may appear inward facing (aesthetically reflexive): for example, reinforcing neighborhood values⁸⁶ or community obligations, such as reminders to clean up after your pet; ‘slow down’ signs that reinforce the neighborhood community as a safe and welcome place for families and children; or the dressing up of municipal signage like ‘stop’ signs (away from standard metal on metal signposts to a more ornate wooden post). These signs communicate and reinforce the communities’ collective perceptions of themselves—not only as a neighbourhood, but as individual owners. Other signs, such as ‘community watch’ or ‘neighborhood watch’ signs, may appear more outward facing (or purely aesthetic). Yet, each type of sign also serves cognitive functions. Signage defines the community’s identity and normative expectations for insider-members as well as communicating to outsiders the norms and identities that the neighborhood seeks to project.

Examples of Neighborhood Warning Signs Alerting Outsiders of Community Watches and Patrols in the U.S. (Top), Spain (Middle) and South Africa (Bottom).

Informationalist accounts of property ownership draw primarily on an aesthetic conception of property signals that are both outward facing and state endorsed. Felix Cohen’s classic embodiment of the exclusionary right as it is expressed by owners was as follows:

To the world:

Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.

Signed: Private Citizen

Endorsed: The State.

This traditional configuration of the aesthetics of exclusion configures the owner of land as the maker of the object; the object as the dominion under his control, and the recipient as the whole world, who is expected to appreciate the symbol that has been directed towards it.⁸⁷ The messaging that Cohen imagines property systems to convey is primarily directed to ‘outsiders’ to the property interest. This is echoed in the ‘information theory’ approach to property, which defines property rights in terms of the duties they impose on the: “large and indefinite class of other person (“the world”)” who are excluded from ‘the thing’.⁸⁸

The role of the state in this traditional configuration is not as the maker of the statement but rather as the endorser, backing the assertion of property-based resilience by the owner.⁸⁹ Ironically, in this configuration, where the “whole world” is the audience of the message by an owner, the impact of endorsement by the state is ambiguous: is the state a neutral figure who ratifies the owner’s claims against others?; or does the statement assume the tacit acceptance of the thing claimed by the owner—so that the state also falls into the category of those to whom notice has been given? This ambiguity was illustrated in the emergence of new owner-led property practices as apartheid came to an end in South Africa. White owner-communities re-interpreted the nature and extent of their ownership rights to infer that the state’s endorsement extended far beyond the boundaries of their properties. This was epitomized in the commandeering of public roads to create private, gated communities, limiting access to outsiders. Over many years, owners took direct action to seize control over these spaces.⁹⁰ While this represented an interference with the rights of the public at large (‘all the world’) to access these public roads, the state did not respond, either because it tacitly endorsed their actions, or because it lacked the resilience to contest their claims. The owners, for their part, accepted state inaction as an implied endorsement of their claims.

6 Ownership, Exclusion and Resilience

Information theories simplify property communications by essentializing the meaning of ownership based on an exclusionary norm. These accounts assert the owner’s ‘right to exclude’ as a message directed towards all comers. However, as we have demonstrated in this article, this framing collapses three distinct forms of resilience claims made by owners. Firstly, owners accrue resilience, additional to their assets of resilience as individuals, by developing and expressing a shared identity within neighbourhood networks. Second, by leveraging their individual and networked resilience, they set territorial boundaries to exclude ‘outsiders’. And thirdly, they articulate expectations and demands directed at the state, invoking state support to back-up their resilience claims. By analyzing the tropes of property (for example, ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’) as discourses, we can disentangle how owners express their resilience claims to different audiences, individually and as networked groups. The high-scale privilege extended to ‘ownership’ through state endorsement allows owners to seek out resilience through the signs they hang—on their own property and in their neighborhoods. The property subject’s resilience needs shape their internal (reflexive) and external (aesthetic) resilience claims, and communications directed to ‘scaling up’ these claims pool their networked capacities and resources, amplifying their claims and directing these, not only at ‘non-owner’ outsiders but towards the state.

The accrual of property-as-resilience by owners—both individually and in aggregation through the neighborhood network—is revealed through three forms of signaling: inference, translation, and longevity. Selected narratives ‘upscale’ and ‘downscale’ these different types of signals to produce (and deplete) resilience for populations of owners, depending on the context. For example: the ability of networked neighbors to hang signs that signal within-group inclusion and send exclusionary ‘keep out’ messages to outsiders to the network signals to the privileges of ownership and to the scaling-up potential of owner-networks.

Example of ‘private property’ sign, Italy

The long-term nature of the owner’s interest means that these signals can be discreet and small, particularly when compared to the larger and bolder signs that outsider counter-claims express. Owners may simply hang signs that announce that the land is ‘private property’, leaving others to draw from this the inferred instruction to ‘keep out’. In contrast, non-owners’ demands for access or to be included are expressed in informal ways: marching through streets, hanging banners outside unowned but occupied buildings, or circulating flyers amongst supporters. While non-owner/outsiders’ claims to be included need to be “large, loud, and unavoidable” because they are inherently tenuous and temporary, owners’ signs can be small, nuanced, and blend into the surroundings because their claims (either individually or collectively) are not threatened by sudden displacement. They have the accrued resilience of longevity, of being fixed in place, rooted and embedded in territory, capable of coalescing support through their sustained presence.

The resilience demands that owners make often respond to perceived threats, the sources of which reflect different audiences. In some cases, threats come from within the network, and signs function to maintain order and identity within the network. In other cases, threats are perceived to come from outside. Neighborhood identity can be recursive to the individual, so that collective efforts to exclude are internalized by individual owners. When owners experience strong identity attachments within their networked neighborhoods, perceived threats to their absolute power and entitlement to exclude others are not merely threats to an abstract concept of exclusion: rather, these are experienced as threats to their personhood and identity: to their resilience. Thirdly, owners may perceive threats if they fear the dilution or withdrawal of state support for their entitlements to maintain the boundaries and identity of their neighborhood.

Territorial behaviors reflect our human instinct for survival, safety and security.⁹¹ Brower argued that human territorial behavior in particular physical settings is: “…characterized by a feeling of possessiveness, and by attempts to control the appearance and use of space.”⁹² Logan and Molotch’s account of neighborhood identity practices (for example, street naming) also supports our argument that the networked neighborhood collaborates to produce (or deepen) individual and collective resilience in ways that are both inclusionary and exclusionary. For example, neighborhood practices of naming places simultaneously reflect the neighbor network’s insider-identity, both on its own terms and relative to other local networks, as well as signaling boundaries that exclude outsiders.⁹³ Communities of owners make ‘boundary statements’ to create and communicate literal and figurative boundaries around the community they are claiming to protect. These boundary statements are both exclusionary and inclusionary: they define both who belongs and who doesn’t.⁹⁴ While boundary statements are intended to shore up the resilience of communities, the articulation of exclusionary neighbor norms may signal a neighborhood ‘pathology’. Saff described how social capital was depleted within exclusionary communities in the U.S.’s ‘sundown towns’—where racialized exclusionary norms were scaled down to neighborhoods that excluded black Americans after sundown unless they held a pass.⁹⁵ The effects of networked neighborhood resilience in galvanizing collective fearfulness of ‘outsiders’ is also manifest in practices of ‘defensive homeownership’,⁹⁶ leading individual owners within some communities to adopt increasingly aggressive approaches to defending their homes. For example, Mark and Patricia McCloskey were infamously captured on video waving and pointing guns from their front lawn as Black Lives Protestors walked through their white suburban neighborhood in 2020.⁹⁷

When owner-neighbors believe that they are under threat, this can animate collective mobilization: creating a shared understanding of the threat as material, shared strategies for addressing the threat, and coalescing with other common stake holders to get the state to act in a way that bolsters their resilience.⁹⁸ Owners may seek out resilience through exclusionary communities, translating their desire for security in the face of perceived threats—whether this relates to bodily security (in the context of fear of crime) or financial security—into manifest claims for privately controlled space. For example, in South Africa, Gated Residential Developments (or GRDs) can be understood as a collective economic response rooted in the alleged failure of the public authorities to provide services and security.⁹⁹ In this frame, the home is (viewed as) an embattled territory and owners fear potential victimization. The resilience needs of owners are extended through a discourse of ‘urban fear’ that taps into concerns for personal safety and bodily security,¹⁰⁰ and that regards the right to exclude others not only from their homes but their communities and neighborhoods as a significant incident of home ownership.¹⁰¹ This aspect of the exclusionary neighborhood can be understood as the converse of the official narrative (arguably rooted in the inclusion of ‘people like us’ and the exclusion of others) that homeownership stabilizes neighborhoods and strengthens communities.¹⁰²

For people who have selected neighborhoods because the identity of the neighborhood reflects their own preferred identities, perceived threats to the neighborhood are experienced as deeply personal, animating their desire to mobilize against that perceived threat.¹⁰³ The hanging of signs that say ‘keep out’ defines the owner’s territory as something to be defended, requiring gates, fences, walls, hedges and other barriers to safeguard ‘us’ from ‘them’. These protectionist practices can be read as a form of virtue signaling that identifies certain actors (insiders) as entitled to protection (or resilience), with others (outsiders) positioned as the audience to these exclusionary signals. They may also, simultaneously, be directed at state actors or agencies, who are characterised as having failed to protect (owner-insider) citizens from the threat that (non-owner) outsiders pose. For example, in Spain, national media reported on hundreds of neighbors in the Basque region who gathered in front of a squatted house, after a 94-year old woman returned to find her home occupied. The story circulated through the country’s news media as an example of neighbors ‘taking back control’ against a backdrop of the state (through policing) and the legal system’s failure to deter trespass.¹⁰⁴

When property owners place exclusionary placards on their properties, or neighborhoods establish community signs signaling collective action they occupy a distinctive space of discourse, exhibiting what Felix Cohen described as a merging of “imperceptible degrees” into the coercive power of the state to define property.¹⁰⁵ The size and placement of these signs implies state endorsement. In the U.S., street level signs that mimic the style and form of ‘official’ signs erected by the state are regularly used to announce ‘neighborhood watch’ programs. These are frequently positioned next to or near other municipal signs or even on the same post as municipal signs (for example, signage relating to traffic patterns or speed limits). This scaling up of an abstracted right to property by announcing state endorsement simultaneously upscales the meaning of property claims from rhetorical expectation to concrete validation.

The neighborhood exclusionary norm, captured in the colloquial NIMBYism (“Not In My Backyard”) can also be seen in the shared agendas of ‘NIMBY-neighbors’, who seek to control the boundaries of the neighborhood under an extended form of private sovereignty.¹⁰⁶ The NIMBYism that has taken root in American zoning practices is a short form of translation communicating to city officials not to invade the self-referential space that neighborhoods and private owners claim. A key feature of NIMBYism is that the collective interest—the resilience claim—is framed not in general terms, but in specific opposition to certain types of activities and developments in the particular location of their homes and neighborhoods.¹⁰⁷ NIMBYism is inherently ‘low-scale’: focused on the community or locale; rather than being concerned with higher-scale political, economic or societal issues;¹⁰⁸ but the issues represent a ‘high-stake’ concern for the residents. Their ability to assert collective demands for state-backed allocations of resilience is enabled by the social cohesiveness that local geography produces.¹⁰⁹

This social cohesiveness is reflected in a shared neighborhood identity, in which the self-identity of owners merges with the social identity of the neighborhood. In some instances, this process has been nurtured by legal frameworks that nurture the emphasis on ‘sameness’ that underpins exclusionary neighborhood norms. The neighborhood identity is then reinforced by individuals who ‘translate’ their own personal identities against the collective identities that neighborhoods foster.¹¹⁰ The idea of ‘character’ has been deployed by neighborhoods to resist changes to the fabric of the neighborhood that were viewed as damaging.¹¹¹ It functions as a means of exclusion; a form of “elective belonging” in which “middle classes elect to move to places for partly symbolic reasons, settling in and often claiming moral rights over those places, with their place of residence subsequently becoming highly significant to their image of self.”¹¹² The processes by which exclusionary neighborhoods scale up their influence through territorial mobilization exacerbate power inequalities in decision-making about what happens in particular places and spaces. Jun and Musso described the collective power of neighbors to determine what happens in the neighborhood—beyond their property lines—as: “privileging the parochial concerns of the wealthy rather than engaging a diversity of stakeholders in coming to a judgment.”¹¹³

It is important to recognize that individual and neighborhood resilience can, also, be bolstered through inclusionary acts. Kimberley Kinder’s account of resilience-boosting acts in declining Detroit neighborhoods offers an important corrective to the idea that resilience-seeking behaviours are necessarily exclusionary.¹¹⁴ As neighborhoods that had once boasted modest middle-income populations struggled to attract new residents to buy or rent vacant homes, these empty properties became sites for scavengers seeking scrap metal, safe havens for illicit drug trades and prostitution, and generally decayed. In some neighborhoods, resident realtors became self-help ‘matchmakers’ in an effort to prevent property vacancies from exacerbating neighborhood decline. Some Detroit “matchmakers,” concerned with preserving their economic stake in the neighborhood, actively recruited squatters to help stabilize neighborhood values (or at least not cause them to further decline). Some saw matchmaking as a means to revitalize the social value that their neighborhoods had provided before the economic decline of the city. Similarly, YIMBY movements within neighbourhoods (particularly around affordable housing programs) advocate for inclusionary approaches to housing, rather than the exclusionary practices of NIMBY movements.¹¹⁵

Inclusionary neighborhoods build resilience by supporting the assimilation of outsiders: for example, by tolerating trespass or allowing the possibility of title acquisition through adverse possession. In these circumstances, the outsider can be socialized and assimilated into the community:

“In this narrative, over time, the squat dweller acquires both legitimacy in the eyes of his neighbors and a stake in the community…Both the squatter and his dwelling evolve toward the norms of the community…He moves from the position of a threatening, marginalized outsider to occupy a place in the community. He accepts community norms and fulfils his responsibilities in the community.”¹¹⁶

Examples of state-endorsed exclusionary strategies include programmes in England and the Netherlands in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the Lower East Side of New York in the late 1990s, when squatters were encouraged to force a correction in the market system.¹¹⁷ The factors that shape and determine the relative ‘openness’ of neighborhoods are multi-layered and multi-scalar. They are local, in terms of the particular constitution of the neighborhood; national, in terms of nation state norms and narratives; and global, influenced by transnational trends that track the exclusionary political currents of the early twenty-first century. Crucially, the character of neighborhoods and communities (inclusionary or exclusionary) is not fixed but changes over time, in response to political, social, economic and cultural contexts.

Reflecting on the nature of ‘community resilience’, Magis observed that, at the aggregated level of the community, ‘assets of resilience’ can be understood as: “the ability of a system to sustain itself through change via adaptation and occasional transformation…”¹¹⁸ At the system-level, communities develop resilience not by resisting or retreating from the changing neighborhood environment, but: “by actively building and engaging the capacity to thrive in an environment characterized by change…”¹¹⁹ Community resilience is fostered not through avoidance or withdrawal from risk; rather, it is derived from: “the existence, development, and engagement of community resources by community members [in order] to thrive in an environment characterized by change, uncertainty, unpredictability, and surprise.”¹²⁰ These knowledge practices are performative, enlisting both the agents that receive resilience from the practice and other individuals and institutions that do the same.¹²¹ They occur in particular locations and circumstances, often obscuring the realities that the knowledge practice seeks to explain.

As knowledge practices reaffirm and reinforce their own validity, they can create new and excessive realities (or over-reliance on those created realities and actors). One example of such a knowledge practice is the idea that ‘property’ is a ‘thing’ (and, particularly, that it is a thing with both fixed and narrowly defined qualities, communicated through ‘simple’ and widely accepted rules) rather than a set of discourses through which the assets of resilience are allocated, accrued and accumulated. Through this lens, the strategies that neighborhoods adopt in seeking out resilience—through exclusionary or inclusionary tactics—are brought into sharp relief and the ‘blind spots’ that flow from focusing on second-order concepts such as ‘exclusion’, or ‘inclusion’, rather than first-order ‘resilience’, are revealed.

7 Conclusions

The features of property law that facilitate inclusion, and the inclusionary behaviors of owners (including non-enforcement of rights to exclude), enable owners to accumulate additional resilience. As such, the abilities of owners—both to exclude and to include—can be understood as emanations of the higher-order concept of ‘property as resilience’. Access to (privatized) property resources also a key component of the resilience claims advanced by, or on behalf of, those property outsiders—non-owners—who are excluded from private property as an asset-of-resilience. The ‘zero-sum game’ of competing property claims implies a critical tension between the owner’s urge to ‘protect what is ours’ by asserting exclusionary rights; and the non-owner’s claim to access or inclusion. This is reflected in competing theoretical accounts of the nature of property and in competing normative prescriptions for property law. Viewed in oppositional terms, the conflict between ‘exclusionary’ and ‘inclusionary’ accounts of private property provides a proxy for polarized political positions to be played out in property scholarship. This, in turn, embeds all the risks and perils that scholarly debates, tracked along ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ lines, produce more heat than light.

By re-positioning ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ as second-order concepts, relative to the (first-order) universal lens of ‘resilience’, we recognize that—in practice—'exclusion’ and the right to exclude are not ends in themselves, but means through which owners seek to shore up the opportunities and advantages embedded in ownership and the institution of private property as an ‘asset of resilience’. At the same time, in shifting our sights to ‘property as resilience’, we recognize both the ‘right to include’ and the ‘right to be included’ as mechanisms through which owners and non-owners alike assert resilience claims. By transitioning to the common register of resilience, we can more clearly recognize the universal human vulnerabilities of owners and non-owners alike, and their corresponding claims to property as an asset of resilience. By locating these second-order concepts on the register of ‘resilience’, we can better understand ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion’ as complementary tools and techniques for leveraging private property as an ‘asset of resilience’.