An exploration of the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, and how people navigate dispossession The old aphorism "possession is nine-tenths of the law" is particularly relevant in Indonesia, which has seen a string of regime changes and a shifting legal landscape for property claims. Ordinary people struggle to legalize their possessions and claim rights in competition with different branches of government, as well as police, army, and private gangs. This book explores the relationship between possession and legalization across Indonesia, examining the imaginative and improvisational interpretations of law by which Indonesians navigate dispossession.

Blighted is a powerful narrative about the decades-long decay and remarkable two-year reinvention of Summerdale, an aging apartment community located in one of Atlanta's grittiest corridors. From burnt-out, mold-infested buildings to traumatized classrooms, Blighted unfolds in the voices of ruthless drug dealers, phantom tenants, fearless landlords, the working poor, educators, and visionary local leaders. After purchasing the property from an absentee overseas owner, Marjy Stagmeier and her partners methodically tackled the crisis festering inside the gated 244-unit apartment property. Two years of relentless work later, Stagmeier reveals how the team that she led built community from chaos. Through on-the-ground, in-the-moment interviews with a wide range of stakeholders, Stagmeier demonstrates how marginalized housing perpetuates intergenerational poverty and the collapse of nearby public schools while showing the multifaceted challenges of improving dire living conditions. Blighted offers a unique insider perspective of the political, human, and economic challenges of delivering equitable housing in a market fueled by inflationary prices, insatiable demand, and competing and often dubious agendas. Summerdale's success is a bright model of how affordable housing, education, healthcare, and social capital can interconnect to build vibrant, sustainable communities-affordable housing communities, nearby schools, and the community at large. From there, kids, families, working people, and neighborhoods can thrive.

This publication examines opportunities for pursuing pro-poor urban resilience initiatives to reduce the increasing impacts of heat stress faced by urban populations in Asia and the Pacific. Cities in the region are increasingly at risk of heat waves, which are expected to be more severe and persistent due to global warming. The urban poor are especially vulnerable to heat stress and associated health and productivity impacts as they often work outdoors and tend to live in overcrowded housing without adequate ventilation or cooling. The publication emphasizes that policies and investments to address heat stress in cities need to be based on long-term planning and actions at all scales: individual and household, neighborhood, and city.

Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People tells the previously untold stories of those living with mortgage debt in times of precarity and explores how individualized indebtedness can unite resistance in the struggle toward housing justice. The book builds on several years of Melissa Garcia-Lamarca's engagement with activist research in Barcelona's housing movement, in particular with its most prominent collective, the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH). What Garcia-Lamarca learned from fellow activists and the movement in Barcelona pushed her to rethink how lived experiences of indebtedness connect to larger political- economic processes related to housing and debt. The book is also inspired by feminist scholars who integrate the lens of everyday life into explorations of contemporary political economy and by anthropologists who connect macroprocesses to lived experience. Distinctive in how it integrates a racialized, gendered, and decolonial perspective, Garcia-Lamarca's research of mortgaged lives in precarious times explores two principal phenomena: first, how financial speculation is experienced in the day-to-day and differentially embedded in the dynamics of (urban) capital accumulation, and second, how collective action can unleash the liberating possibility of indebtedness.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Johnson v. McIntosh established the basic principles that govern American Indian property rights to this day. In the case, more than one Anglo-American purchaser claimed title to the same land in what is now southern Illinois. The Piankeshaw Indians had deeded the land twice-once to speculators in 1775, and again, thirty years later, to the United States by treaty. The Court decided in favor of William McIntosh, who had bought the land from the U.S. government. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that the "discovery" of America had given "exclusive title to those who made it"-namely, the European colonizers. According to Johnson, the Piankeshaws did not own what they thought was their land. Indeed, no Indian tribe did. Buying America from the Indians offers a comprehensive historical and legal overview of Native land rights since the European "discovery" of the New World. Watson sets the case in rich historical context. After tracing Anglo-American views of Native land rights to their European roots, Blake A. Watson explains how speculative ventures in Native lands affected not only Indian peoples themselves but the causes and outcomes of the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, and ratification of the Articles of Confederation. He then focuses on the transactions at issue in Johnson between the Illinois and Piankeshaw Indians, who sold their homelands, and the future shareholders of the United Illinois and Wabash Land Companies. The final chapters highlight the historical legacy of Johnson v. McIntosh on federal policy with regard to Indian lands. Taught to first-year law students as the root of title for real property in the United States, the case has also been condemned by the United Nations and others as a Eurocentric justification for the subjugation of North American indigenous peoples. Watson argues that the United States should formally repudiate the discovery doctrine set forth in Johnson v. McIntosh. The thorough backstory and analysis in this book will deepen our understanding of one of the most important cases in both federal Indian law and American property law.