Urban Land in Honiara: Strategies and Rights to the City

Foukona, Joseph D. (2015) Urban Land in Honiara: Strategies and Rights to the City. The Journal of Pacific History, 50 (4). pp. 504-518. ISSN 0022-3344

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Abstract

Urban Honiara is increasingly a space in which the poor and even the ‘middle class’ are excluded from both market and regulatory orders. This paper discusses the strategies that urban residents employ to access land in the face of these multiple exclusions. Drawing upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and recent case studies of urban spaces in the global south, I apply the ‘right to the city’ framework as a heuristic with which to analyse these strategies. I demonstrate that both settlers from other islands and Indigenous people from Guadalcanal deploy identity narratives – underpinned by claims to moral legitimacy – in their struggles over Honiara’s urban space. The paper is in three parts. The first part discusses the right to the city framework and how it
has been productively applied in other urban contexts. The second part examines how the history of land alienation in the Honiara area contributed to its
contemporary conditions of exclusion. The final part discusses the strategies that people use to access urban land in Honiara and suggests that these might be best
understood in terms of the claims to moral legitimacy that are central to the right to the city framework.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D839 Post-war History, 1945 on G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) K Law > K Law (General)
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Law and Education (FALE) > School of Law
Depositing User:	Joseph Foukona
Date Deposited:	24 Oct 2016 05:37
Last Modified:	24 Oct 2016 05:37
URI:	https://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/9420

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