Programmable Cadastral Institutions: Land Rights and Sovereign Data for Informal Settlements

Transcript

Yes, thank you. >> Hello, good afternoon. My name is Clara. I'm an architect and I work on system design and also pilots for Latin comments and housing comments. I recently co-ounded KMA which is a civic tech researcher studio where we are unwinding enclosers. The research that I'm going to talk to you about today it's about um it's led by Charlie Fisher who's my co-founder and collaborator. He's under Ethereum Foundation fellowship uh PhD and he couldn't be here today. So that's why I'm going to talk about um talk about myself.

So before I jump into this, I want to start with a personal note. This is the first picture that I took when I landed in India 20 years ago. It was the independence day and I remember like getting down from the bus finding like these three girls and regardless we have like a very short interaction. the way that they impacted in my systems thinking the values and the way that also I've carried that along through my career I think it's remarkable so in a way being here today um brings me back to that first day when I landed in Delhi I'll start with David Graver so he says

property is not a relationship between a people a person and a thing it's an agreement between people um picture this. So you are in an island and you can use whatever you want, right? All the resources are available to you. The question of property actually like doesn't really come up. It only matters when there's a second person joining you on the island by then you can start saying I'll use this, I'll build that, you will build this other thing, I will use this other thing, this shack is mine, this other is yours. Right? So it's um an example to say like the property is actually like the agreement between these two people that are there and hold on to that because like the

talk that I'm going to present today it's about like how community land agreements can actually like be recognized to avoid displacement and ensure um belonging to a place. So let's start with displacement because this is a pattern that we can find in many places in informal neighborhoods. We can find it and triggered by redevelopment but in cities especially like in the western capitals also increasingly in capitals around Latin America and Asia that displacement is triggered by short-term rentals um that hollow out neighborhoods.

It's also present in coastal lines uh or other like nature spaces where we can find psychosis residencies. We can find also like tourism pricing out locus from their villages. The particular case and interest in informal settlement is that it's where the pressure needs the least legal protection. So it's where the consequences are more severe. There's roughly 1 billion people actually like living in informal settlements around the world. That accounts for one out of eight people alive in the world today.

These people they you know they know the community. Everybody knows them. Um they hold houses in practice through informal agreements. And what do they don't have is like a paper that says this is yours. You can live here. Usually governments in most of these cases they are either absent um or they ways of like recognizing property don't actually recognize communal tenure. So this is not like a minor problem. We have like more than 50% of the total land on earth that it's actually holded by informal customerly um rights and agreements. But only like 11% of them

are actually like recognized as theirs. That triggers a huge and security and actually like there's a study by printex that they said is um around like 1.1 billion people actually are feeling secure about losing their land and or their home. So how governments have been tackling these issues in the last 100 years more or less is through individual title. So basically usually like they would erase um relocate some of the people and then give them individual title. They argue that these informal communities sits on

top of debt capital that needs to be unlocked for them to access investment, mortgages etc. But what happens is like the records across all these decades and programs that have been going on um said that it rarely happens at scale. this redevelopment the credit that is promised usually never arise because like banks don't get loans to poor households then divin the individual title doesn't feed how people actually hold land um because there are a lot of you know like overlapping new ways of living together different uses in a single space so when the market actually like switches on we

have like wealthier families moving in we have pressure to sell out So eventually it also comes to displacement and speculation and capture. So the promised security is not actually there. It depends on whether the system can see you and how. And I'm going to be so bring this into the actual Mumbai context. So just a few kilometers down there um across the bridge there's Tavi which is the largest informal neighborhood in Mumbai. They sit into they generate an economy of $1 billion dollar per year and still whether you can prove that in 2000 you were living there you you've been living there

determines whether you will be relocated into the new redevelopment or you will be displaced. And here's what it's interesting because like that legibility of being able to prove that it's not neutral. Um another example here to say like we don't solve that with more data entries or more databases because India has digitalized its land records and they still cannot say legally um who owns a certain plot and here we come down to the question of the court thing here is governance. So let me explain you how communities have been tackling the issue

of um the lack of the of the legality in informal settlements. Usually what they've been doing is mapping. So participatory mapping, social tenure domain models, cadast open maps, these are like mature tools. What happens is like none of these tools breaches the community collected data to the legal recognition. So there's like a gap that more tooling doesn't fix. Successful use cases. I name three, but basically it's when these bottom up mapping meets legal recognition and there's like a strong governance layer.

There are successful use cases in Thailand, in Rwanda and some as well are here in India. And let me jump into the blockchain implementations because that's why we are here. Um there's a study that reported 13 blockchain land registry pilots not in informal settlements just like in general and they said that only three are actually real implementations. Georgia claims to be the first um land registry pilot. It's actually a centralized estate database which its records are hashed into a chain for temper um proof. In Zambia they formalize settlements by capturing

names, ids, photos which is actually like the problem of the privacy um in a nutshell and in Dubai they recently titled on a public chain tokenized dates trading on a secondary market. They sold a villa to more than or almost 170 investors in five minutes. But notice what they are optimizing for. They are optimizing for a maximum liquidity and land tradable as an asset. So um I put here like a graphic on one end we have like governance from centralized to decentralized and the other one we have legibility right like from more public um tradable map to more household like

more privacy and notice how all these use cases sit in the centralized and um public tradable map. Let me add a third axis which is commodity. So on the high end we'll have like land conceptualized as a tradable asset and on the other one protected as commons. So the empty corner here on red which is community governle legibility it's decommodified and still recognized by law is where the research of this Ethereum fellowship um is sitting. We call that stewardship.

So getting back to the property as an agreement between people, what is the agreement these communities need? And it comes down to three things. Um on one hand it's the possession. So the right to stay longterm to live there. You can even add the right to even like be able to give that use to your children or your fi direct family members. Um it's customary which means that the community decides the agreements between them and how they run a place and the third and probably the most important one is inalienability. So the idea that some things are just like too fundamental to be sold in legal terms. We have a rapper um in many

different jurisdictions that's called community land trust which is basically like we hold land in a trust. We remove it from the market and then we lease that land to the residents. And I'm going to actually explain you like briefly two networks that work this way. The first one is Midhouser Syndicate in Germany. Basically like all projects underneath this network they have two owners. One is a network itself and the other one as the the residents and basically like the network has B2 power if the residents want to sell that project back into the market. The other example is Fund Prius. This is back home in Catalonia where they hold rural land

and as commons and basically like they embedded in the design the like the ban to sort of like bring these properties back into the market. Okay. So here's the question that this research is actually addressing. So can a community govern its own land record with immutable, adjustable and discretionary rules held in verifiable infrastructure in a privacy way by design and recognized by law.

And so we are at the very beginning of the research just starting. And what we want to do is sort of like bring um comparative analysis between like different uh informal settlements. The first one is Kanyo Martin Pñena in San Juan, Puerto Rico. This is a good reference because like things that they did like a bottomup mapping uh process when the government brought a law that revoke their land rights they were able to they were able to um fight that on court and actually like they won the right to stay. So that's a good precedent for other informal communities. We also have um the example of Jaga mission here in

India which we consider like a good reference for the scale of the project is like they were able to map more than uh 3,000 informal um neighborhoods and give them title and then the one that is probably um more interesting to us in terms of like uh primary research file is Cape Town in South Africa and it's mostly because of two reasons. The first one is because in 2025 they created a law where they basically recognized electronic um land rights which that could open as the the door to recognize community mapping into into the system and the second one is because like the jurisdiction of South

Africa already recognizes as well um community land trusts. So here's the framework that the study will test. Um we want to test like the imitability. So imagine like you are in a community assembly, two neighbors attest to a boundary on which state who etc etc. And then we record that in a way that cannot be rewritten and it's verifiable. It could be adjustable. So say um depending on how many adistations we need for a particular plot regarding if there's more like contested or not then the community can turn on and off the number of you know um vouchers that they

need themselves without sort of like a central authority or without like uh defining what's the threshold up front. And then the other thing the other rule that we want to test is like the discretionarity meaning that the disputes would go to human panels. So we don't want to automate judgment or edge cases because they usually come um could come into writing of injustice and then we go into the privacy layer. So basically like we are probably going to propose like two layers. One is the land registry layer itself which binds a plot to anonymous identifier and that carries the attestations right like who

bel what about what and then is the identity layer which this is what binds the identifier to a person proving the claim without needing to reveal the person um that comes from um relational identity as well. So not using a central um registry and the goal here is that there's no public uh map linking people's ids with plots. We know that we are going to face challenges. Um of course we'll face like the Oracle problem. Um it's always there when you connect any record to the physical world. um we'll need to establish like the dispute resolution

through the community governance and then we'll need to address people making fake claims basically like a community recreating its own explos exclusions and then there are other challenges that are not actually like that linked into the um design of the mechanism itself but more on the funding and maintainance of these systems over time. So um what I try to convey is that redevelopment in the last 100 years it's been always following a certain pattern which is like the demolishment building towers relocating some of the people and displacing others. Um this tends to raise a social and economic fabric

because like most of these informal settlements rely highly on the street and pedestrian economy. I've also like tried to bring examples on where settlements were often better developed from within um acknowledging the relationships that are already there. But yet the problem until now probably is that we don't have the infrastructure equal to the complexity a network society can now hold. So if property is an agreement between people, those relationships are the infrastructure and the research is basically like tackling that sort of encoding those relationships into a

protocol. What we are looking for out of like being here and explaining about this project is um talking to practitioners, researchers for the comparative interview program. We are also happy to talk about CLTs and informal settlement organizations on the ground willing to be the comparator sites or sharing their experience and for this audience today Ethereum builders um sharing conversations about like the ad stations SSIS uh special primitives or any feedback that you think could be relevant.

Thank you so much for having us. Hey, good. It's time for the questions, I guess. Yeah, just to remind, please use QA QR code, ask questions. Topic is very interesting. So, I do believe we can start with the first one. Yes. Um, so you actually have this um survey both in South Africa and India. And Clara, where do you see actually the biggest challenges is here or actually in South Africa and why?

That's that's a really really good question. Um the response I can give is probably based on assumptions and not actually facts because we're still like early on that research. Um there could be like challenges in both. I think here in India probably there's a challenge of a scale um which can certainly like be a difficulty and there could be also like the challenge personally on the language because we don't speak Hindi um or other like local languages um yeah I wish I had a better answer for this one um

my instinct is India it's going to be more challenge Got it. Got it. Thank you. Okay, let's move to the next question. And since actually we see um Okay. Um let it be next one. This one. Um what is the biggest harm you saw in your field in South Africa? >> Um yeah. So basically uh wrapping up, we haven't started the research there. We are like very at the beginning. Um the biggest harm I think like not only like in South Africa but in other like um places is like the the gap or the link between um mapping out the communities

and actually not having legal recognition of that um of that data. So so the backup on the legal system I think it's the biggest risk. >> Got it. Thank you. And we have a next one and I believe we have time for that. So when it come to land ownership transfers Yeah. what is a potential mechanism that can be used in case of the death or actually of the original owner. >> Okay. Um couple of things. So when we are talking about land stewardship, it means like the community is legally holding that land into um an entity, right? And so the people or the residents living there, they actually

have the right to steward, the right to use that space. This is important because like when somebody dies um these right actually can be inherited or trespassed to their direct family members or exchange um or another person would take it but there's no cell um >> yeah good good thanks for answering and we have a next one question that I see already many wants to see so you made a statement that we don't have uh infrastructure that we need uh did you have a chance to ask or assume that informal settles meet. Yeah. Whether they actually want to continue to actually live like this or etc.

>> Yeah. So basically um we are having this conversations. Me myself was yesterday in Darabi um talking to the people figuring out their needs. Um getting I mean getting to know more about their lives and it's actually there's also like a art installation that we repair downstairs. No, on this floor um which is actually doing a research on the voices of these people from diabetes. So basically like we are recording privately and anonymously like the experience of the people living there and which each recording we are triggering an generative art piece um that grows um with the number of you know integrations that we receive from uh inputs that we receive from from the

local people. So yeah, you can get to check it out. >> Thanks. Thanks. Let's move forward. Still lots of questions. So which Athereum identity or token actually? Yes. Uh you have considered for this project. >> Um yeah, that's probably a question that I would like to answer more in another setup. But I think that we were looking to B3 uh credentials for um for the attestations protocols on identity. I think we will need to research on um decentralized identity. I'm thinking about like how Gitcoin sorted out the identity the centralization identity in in the past years as a reference but um

we'll probably get Yeah, I want to I want to dig deeper so to know what what's new there. >> Got it. Got it. Okay. I'm very thankful for each question. Sorry, no more time. As I mentioned, it's great topic and I'm personally very