#peaceful techno-socialists among the ruins

[tanadrin]

Land Tenure and Property in Seileshrant

About two hundred years ago, the world ended for the people of Seileshrant. Global political instability driven by resource constraints due to climate change, a series of bad political decisions by world leaders, and the ensuing breakdown of the international order led to a general nuclear war. In the aftermath, a collapse of international trade and damage to infrastructure led to starvation and pandemics. It was, for the people of that era, very much like their most pessimistic predictions for the future. And yet, those that looked around in the aftermath could not help but realize one simple fact: they had survived. And there was nothing to do, but to keep on living.

Two things did not happen that they had feared. For one, people did not instantly revert to barbarism. This prediction, that the post-nuclear world would be home to cannibal kings and roving plunderers, proved to be the lurid fantasy of those who, by want of attention to the relevant scientific literature, failed to understand how humans actually react to sudden catastrophe. And it failed to understand the keenest pain felt by those whose world had been annihilated by war: in the absence of that world, they wanted to rebuild it as swiftly as possible. The second thing that did not happen is that humanity did not revert to technological ignorance or luddism. The only hope of rebuilding the things that they had lost, after all, was in mastering and deploying every bit of technical knowhow they had on hand. The destruction of roads and cities and factories, coupled with the deaths of billions, did indeed trigger a massive economic contraction whose effects would be felt more than two centuries later, and it is an unescapable truth that some knowledge, irrelevant for the long decades of initial rebuilding, was lost--knowledge like how to manage transcontinental logistics effectively, or operate ports that handled millions of tons of cargo annually--but the civilization that preceded Seileshrant wrote and recorded information obsessively. Not only physical science, but art and philosophy and history and a hundred other disciplines carried on very much as before, incorporating this catastrophe into themselves like they had the plagues and collapses of empire before.

So, yes: four hundred years ago, the world ended, in Seileshrant and everywhere else. But then it continued to spin; and, looking about themselves, the survivors noticed that they were stuck with the world that came after. And so with heavy hearts they set about their task--and resolved to build a world that was, if they could manage it, a little bit better than the one they had lost.

Seileshrant sits along a wide inland sea, an inlet of the great ocean; primevally, its land was a strip dense conifer forests, pinned between the mountains and the open ocean. From the inlet whence the country draws its name hundreds or thousands of smaller bays, sounds, and fjords cut into the land, producing a thick scattering of islands along the shores, and spreading across the bays like stepping-stones. The climate is temperate, on the warmer side, and oceanic. The winters in Seileshrant are mild, but very wet, while summers are drier. Four hundred years ago, Seileshrant was home to two large cities, one to the south and one to the north. Both are now sprawling ruins; the total population of Seileshrant now is only a little more than three-quarters what the population of those cities were at their peak; it is about one million people. The current largest city and economic hub of Seileshrant is Green Mountain, with about three hundred thousand people, located roughly halfway between the two great ruined cities. The name is an old one, from the prewar era, though perhaps one not entirely well-translated.

Seileshrant borders are not quite firmly delineated. To the east are high mountains, and beyond that a country that is very sparsely populated. This definitely does not belong to Seileshrant . Its people are organized into far smaller communities, and though friendly with the people of Seileshrant , too independent-minded to consider themselves culturally the same. To the west, of course, is the ocean. North, along the island-specked coast, the population gradually thins out, and the towns there participate less often in the great projects and major cultural events that seem to define Seileshrant for its people. To the south, after the land bends sharply westward, abruptly cutting off the inland sea, there is an allied state organized along much more centralized lines. It and Seileshrant and dozens--hundreds, really--of other communities on the same continent are loosely confederated. A common rule of law runs throughout the hemisphere, both an assurance of individual rights and a safeguard against any other catastrophic wars that might devastate the planet. But this is still a postapocalyptic world. The states are smaller, the populations more thinly spread, the difficulty of travel greater, than they were in a century or two or more before the end of the world, and the dream of a single world united in harmony is perhaps even more distant for the people of Seileshrant than it is for our own.

This is not a utopia. This is by no means a perfect world. The people of Seileshrant would be the first to tell you that. They have lost so much that the grief of it still overwhelms them sometimes, even two hundred years later. They would be the first to tell you that if that great disaster had been averted, if people had just been a little less stupid, if they had been a little more hesitant to lash out with the worst of weapons, well, who knows what kind of world they would be living in? What kind of wonders they’d have achieved by now? But it doesn’t really bear thinking about, because that’s not the world they live in. Thus the motto of Seileshrant: “the world that is given to us.”

The constitutive political unit of Seileshrant is the “neighborhood.” It’s a technical term, now quite divorced from the folksy connotations it was originally intended to inspire. (Such is the fate of all bureaucratic terminology!) Originally intended to denote a small part of an urban community, a neighborhood designates a contiguous physical expanse that can contain anywhere from dozens to thousands of households. A neighborhood is the formal administrator of its territory, but not the actual owner of property, and while neighborhoods may level certain kinds of taxes to pay for their own upkeep, they also don’t directly manage larger pieces of infrastructure. What they do manage, most importantly, is housing. For Seileshrant, “housing” is all physically occupied real estate, residential and commercial. (Industrial is a slightly distinct case in some circumstances--agricultural, polluting, and location-specific industries are managed differently.) By general custom, housing is managed by lottery: when a unit of housing falls vacant, a lottery is held among those wishing to move into the neighborhood, or that unit specifically, weighted if necessary to accomodate people with specific needs (e.g., a ground floor apartment for someone who can’t manage stairs). If the wait list for housing is very long, this is generally seen as a sign that a neighborhood needs more housing. It falls to the neighborhood to build it, funded by taxes or a grant. This process is automatic; the organic laws which establish a neighborhood generally instruct that the building committees “shall” begin planning procedures when a certain waitlist threshold is reached. It can be delayed, but not indefinitely; a long and ever-growing waitlist is generally seen as a sign that a neighborhood’s leadership is neglecting its job.

No housing is owned. Indeed, the concept of “ownership” of real estate doesn’t exist in Seileshrant. The tenant--the resident, we should say; they pay no rent or property tax--has the right of quiet enjoyment of their home. They cannot be evicted. All persons of majority age (and minors under various conditions) are guaranteed a home. You might want to opt to live with your friends if you’re young; the wait list can be shorter if you’re willing to have roommates. Commercial property works much the same way: businesses--which as legal entities are a unionized workplace with a persistent identity--occupy storefronts and workshops and small factory spaces on much the same basis; if they move or dissolve, the space is reallocated according to a weighted lottery, administered by the neighborhood, though under standards enshrined by law throughout Seileshrant.

Very large, very specialized endeavors--ports, hospitals, power plants, wastewater treatment--will be the common task of groups of neighborhoods. These are “towns,” but it’s important to note that towns do not need to be contiguous and have flexible membership. A neighborhood can also belong to more than one town at a time. Towns levy taxes to fund major common projects, but their area of operations is mostly limited to what we would think of as municipal-scale works. Importantly, neighborhoods unhappy with their town can, to a limited extent, opt to join another for some purposes. A sewer system is hard to reconfigure, but if you want a different garbage pickup service, that’s a bit easier to rearrange. Some towns are highly specialized and offer only one service: the South Seileshrant Power Town runs a nuclear plant that thousands of neighborhoods use, and does nothing else. Others are functionally independent cities: Green Mountain Town coordinates almost every public service in Green Mountain.

Every town, every neighborhood that isn’t a part of a town, and the unincorporated rural areas of Seileshrant are organized under the auspices of the Seileshrant Coordinating Committee, a body of directly elected officials organized via a set of more than two dozen statutes. Various communities in the Seileshrant region have decided to what extent they want to participate in the SCC’s activities; most are signatories to every statute; some to only a majority, some to only a few. As a result, the authority of Seileshrant’s collective elected government varies, although certain essential laws (like those banning murder) always have force everywhere; and all of Seileshrant is strongly influenced by the same common body of legal customs.

The SCC manages pensions and basic income; it pays for healthcare and heavily subsidizes the Seileshrant Free University; it also manages the major wilderness reserves. In setting certain statutory minimum rights, the SCC has a big effect on how real estate is managed in Seileshrant--but it, also, is not in any real sense the “owner” of property or land. Rather, in all Seileshrant, the governing principles behind how land or a building or a space is disposed of is: 1) is it being used? 2) Does someone want to use it? 3) Will the use they want to put it to have negative effects on those around them? 4) Can these effects be reasonably mitigated? You cannot open a fireworks factory next to a preschool, generally speaking; but the system is designed to enable, not to inhibit, the productive use of space.

A special case might seem to arise in those circumstances, when a resident or commercial user of property makes immovable improvements to land or a building. To treat the cases in ascending order of complexity: basic resident rights mean there are some things (putting up pictures, painting, redoing your kitchen) a neighborhood cannot and would never forbid. The costs of upkeep beyond basic maintenance for a house or apartment fall to a neighborhood and not the resident, which might seem like an incentive not to take care of your home--but because nobody is ever going to kick you out, and you’ll probably be living their a long time, that is in fact a very strong incentive to take good care of the place you live in. After all, the unit you live in is in a very real sense exclusively yours--no one else has a right to be there. You just can’t sell it when you’re done with it.

What about if you build your own house on unoccupied land? For one, you automatically have the right to live there. Indeed, it’s yours as long as you want it--no evictions, remember? And you can even pass it on to your heirs: residential rights can be bequeathed under certain circumstances, including that of a house you built yourself. The only thing you or your heirs can’t do is 1) sell it, or 2) let it stand empty. If you have a house in Green Mountain, and your aunt leaves you a house up north, you have to pick one or the other to live in. The one that’s empty will go in the lottery.

What about non-residential structures--say, specially built factories or mines or farms? Is it worth it to invest money and time and labor in improving property you can’t sell? Well, yes--productive improvements are productive improvements. And businesses enjoy similar, if a little more limited, rights to occupation as individual residents. The SCC will even help fledgeling cooperatives undertake new tasks with loans or subsidies if they think their business will be especially economically beneficial to the region. What you cannot do is extract rents.

Many other kinds of property also don’t exist in Seileshrant. You can’t own part of a company; there are no stocks. All companies are owned entirely by their workers, per SCC regulations. Companies can still split and merge as their workers see fit, but they’re much more like democracies than dictatorships. If the lack of capitalistic investment seems like it would inhibit economic growth, remember that Seileshrant’s economy is far smaller than our own; any benefits it might be missing out on there are probably comparatively small. Seileshrant has no legal concept of intellectual property. Artists have the moral right to be identified as the creator of their work, and certain kinds of limited copyright exist, but these are more akin to choosing which Creative Common license you want to distribute your work under, with preventing other people from selling copies of your work or close derivatives being assumed as the default. It is always legal to redistribute copies of artistic works for free. Most movable property is covered under the law of possessions, which gives rights of exclusive use and bequest to the things you keep in your house, or on your person, or otherwise haven’t intentionally abandoned, even more strongly than it does to housing. And businesses have the same rights to the fruits of their common labor, at least until they’re sold or abandoned.

In general, a Seileshranter would be a little puzzled at our ideas about property, namely the way in which we exercise a kind of sovereign metaphysical authority over space. In Seileshrant, law and custom is much more narrowly focused: it is geared at solving in practical terms certain problems of competing uses and desires. Either you’re using a thing or you’re not, and if you’re not, someone else is generally permitted to use it. The system has its limitations, but it also has several salubrious effects: lacking a concept of property, as well as sovereignty, has perhaps given the Seileshranters a much more nuanced attitude toward how they think about shared spaces and objects in their communities; what communal administration of space looks like when it doesn’t have to demonstrate that is possesses metaphysical authority; and, indeed, what their government is for and what it is supposed to be doing at any given moment.