Property

A powerful examination of how property shaped the modern world - and why it now threatens the freedoms and stability it was meant to sustain. Property carries a great promise: that it will make you rich and set you free. But it is also a weapon, an agent of displacement and exploitation, the currency of kleptocrats and oligarchs. In Britain, it has led to a new class division between those who own and those who don't. Property is a vivid, far-reaching analysis of our concept of property ownership, from 16th-century enclosures to the present day. It tells powerful stories - of life in the developer-led boomtown of Gurgaon in India, of the struggles to form Black communities in Missouri and Georgia, of a giant experiment in co-operative living in the Bronx, of the impacts of Margaret Thatcher's 'property-owning democracy.' Above all, Property asks how we have come to view our homes as investments - and it offers hope for how things could be better, with reform that might enable the social wealth of property to be returned to society.

Rowan Moore is the award-winning architecture critic of the Observer and author of Slow Burn City (2016) and Why We Build (2012). He was formerly Director of the Architecture Foundation, architecture critic of the Evening Standard and editor of Blueprint magazine.