Created in 2004

Coordinators
Main contact person:
Dr. Sergio Nasarre Aznar
Professor Agregat de Dret Civil
Universitat Rovira i Virgili
Avda. Catalunya, 35
43002 Tarragona
sergio.nasarre@urv.cat
Tel. 977558324
Fax. 977558386

Jane Ball
School of Law, Bartolomé House,
Winter St., Sheffield, S3 7ND
England
jane.ball@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: 0114-222-6861
Fax: 0114-222-6832
 
Wolfgang Amman
Director, IIBW – Institute for Real Estate, Construction and Housing
Eichendorffgasse 4/8,
1190 Vienna, Austria,
Tel. and fax: +431 968 6008
Mobile: +43 650 301 69 60
amann@iibw.at

Professor Julio Ponce Sole
Department of Administrative and Procedural Law,
Faculty of Law,
Universidad de Barcelona,
Avda. Diagonal, 684,
80034 Barcelona
Tel. and fax: 93 402 43 84
jponce@ub.edu

The Central Theme of the Working Group
The general aims of the group are to promote dialogue and European research on the importance of law, rights and regulation to all aspects of housing, land and planning. These objectives continue to be very broad to accommodate national differences.

Besides their political, social, and economic, implications, housing, land and planning are profoundly influenced by varying national legal environments. International exchange in this area has always been handicapped by quite different national approaches and traditional groupings of legal and socio-legal expertise, despite an overarching EU and European rights legal framework. The EU and ECHR drive towards European harmonization have not explicitly dealt with land law, but affect this strongly.

Even now, it is difficult at present to find a foreign partner for a dialogue on the most basic national regulation, such as theory affecting law, international treaties, property and tenancy forms and mechanisms of public regulation of housing, institutional forms, support for rights, finance, sustainable or affordable development, urban renewal and planning. Our network and its connectedness to other networks with whom we collaborate can help. The group has particular strength in property rights, social problems and complex public and private law problems arising from residence.

This group hopes to promote exchange and debate between people in the same area as well as promoting understanding of law in this area, its basis and effects in Europe.   Work on  legal, economic, sociological and philosophical theories are welcome, as well as sociological empirical work on the implementation of law. This should create a useful network connected to other networks, improve the accuracy of comparative studies generally, illuminate European and International law and lead to ground breaking work including publication and improve European understanding in some fundamental areas.

Recent activities and plans for the Up-Coming Year
The "Legal aspects of housing, land and planning" group now has around 70 members, is now well established at the ENHR conferences with workshops since 2002, most recently in Prague last year. We had 9 papers, from Ireland, Spain, Finland, Japan, Austria, the UK and Norway. Many of the papers concerned problems with ownership of flats, particularly in East European Countries and the Far East. A comprehensive tenure and finance law is being drafted for Romania. Another theme was banks, credit and eviction in the current credit crunch but also debate about public law principles, discrimination, democratic accountability, sustainability and how to ensure people know their rights.

The 2009 papers will be published in the International Journal of the Law of the Built Environment guest edited by Padraic Kenna (Ireland) and Alice Christudason (Singapore). There are no plans for publication of this year’s papers collectively, although this could change.

There have been developments in the sister networks working globally in the same area (below).  A distribution list of interested people run by Paul Chynoweth (below) now has around 550 members so that matters of interest can be disseminated easily. Members of that list, including our members, can now exchange news, information and documents online using Web 2.0 software in a group on www.academia.edu.

Another development is a new ENHR working group in a related area "Land for affordable and social housing: Condition for urban dynamics and housing change." There is collaboration between these groups, and there may be a joint session at Istanbul in overlapping areas.

Summary of the Activities during the Past Few Years
An important part of the group's activities is the annual conference with the ENHR for the six conferences since 2002. There is a strong representation of non-lawyers in the group and a particularly dominant theme this year was the occupancy of land. 

For the last two years, the group has arranged publication of their conference papers in periodicals. The 2008 papers will be published in the USA in the new ASCE Journal of Legal Affairs, and the 2009 papers will be published as above. Both issues should appear in  2010 (things seemed to go slower in the US, not least with the extra complexity of ensuring that papers on civil law were understandable by common lawyers).
 
There are now three global groups overlapping the subject matter of this one, excluding the private law networks concerned with European harmonization. Our group collaborates with others:

Paul Chynoweth's "Law & Dispute Resolution" Working Commission (W113) within the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction, having an conference presence at COBRA (run by RICS in the UK).

and

Rachelle Alterman's Planning Law and Property Rights Forum within the Association of European Schools of Planning – website: http://www2.fmg.uva.nl/planning-law/.

Members sometimes attend conferences run by each others' groups. Our ENHR group has around 65 members in more than 20 countries, but the three groups taken together amount to more than 600 people with similar interests.  All of these people can be circulated with information through BEL-NET, the Built Environment Law network (run by Paul Chynoweth), a loose association of interested people and he has made available his distribution list for all three networks and his website http://www.bel-net.org. 

We do not wish to clearly define differences between the various networks since all accept many types of work, but a feature of this group is that other ENHR members, who have a question with a legal dimension, dip in and out of our group, and it is consequently often interdisciplinary. It also has a particular social dimension because of the housing aspect and a strong focus on property law. The study of rights is strong, interconnected in a broad way to other land and planning problems. Our group also has a strong tendency to create mini-networks, where people identify common interests and carry out particular projects, and we can often help each other with research information informally.

Further items of information
Members of our group seem to be spontaneously thinking about similar sorts of problems, more than in the past and these problems sometimes are also considered by new members.