Comparing Landownership Structures: the Owners of Residential Land in Luxembourg and Aix-Marseille

There is limited knowledge on who owns land in advanced economies, even as property assets and their ownership are fast becoming a key political issue. More specifically, land is at the heart of discussions around the production of the built environment in planning and policy circles, as well as in the private sphere. The aim of this article is to develop a method to compare the structure of landownership across different national contexts, and in this way to move debates on ‘who owns the land’ away from their idiosyncratic focus on local legal frameworks, institutions and policy debates. We focus on two features of landownership structures – the distribution of land among types of owners and the degree of ownership concentration within each owner type – and on the cases of Luxembourg and the Aix-Marseille metropolitan region in France. These two urban areas have similar spatial extents, but have contrasting population and economic growth dynamics, as well as different historical and institutional contexts. The protection of private property is more complete in Luxembourg, and land taxation is thus lower there; there has been substantially more public involvement in land markets in France. In this comparative exercise, we are concerned with the ownership of residential land, that is, land that has been zoned for residential construction in local land use maps. The first step of our analysis is thus the development of a common methodology to identify residential land in both contexts, as well as to obtain comparable information on the owners of these land plots. The distribution of residential land among broad owner types brings out some differences between Aix-Marseille and Luxembourg, linked to different historical trajectories of public involvement in land markets: a larger proportion of public landowners in the French case study, and the fact that private developers own an important share of residential land in Luxembourg. However, the analysis of the degree of residential land concentration among the broad types of owners reveals a striking similarity: the distribution of residential land among individuals is concentrated to the same degree in both case study areas. This points to the structural nature of landownership concentration, and thus a weaker than expected influence of legal, political and institutional context on landownership structures. We use these results to develop implications for policy and research, but also to call for more comparative work on landownership structures, both within and across national contexts.