Who Owns the Land Beneath Community Regeneration?

Across the UK, there is a renewed sense that place matters.

Governments are launching programmes focused on neighbourhood health, pride, community wealth and local leadership. Scotland has recently passed legislation centred on Community Wealth Building, signalling a growing willingness to rethink how economic value flows through places.

Yet beneath many of these initiatives sits a quieter question — one that planning and regeneration debates often avoid:

Who owns the land?

Land ownership shapes almost every outcome we see in neighbourhood change. It determines whether value created by regeneration is retained locally or extracted elsewhere. It influences housing affordability, business diversity, long-term stewardship and community stability. It affects whether residents experience renewal as empowerment or displacement. I saw it in Middlesbrough with the Just Neighbourhoods? research project, when residents wanted to improve a back alley through maintaining and decorating the walls, but who owns the wall prevented the project from being a complete success.

For decades, regeneration policy has tended to focus on projects, programmes and investment streams. But land operates differently. Unlike most assets, its value rises largely through collective effort; infrastructure investment, public services, community activity, market demand, rather than the work of the individual landowner. When land is treated purely as a commodity, this unearned increase in value can drive speculation, intensify development pressure and disconnect ownership from responsibility to place.

This is not a new insight. Economists such as E. F. Schumacher and practitioners including Robert Swann, who helped establish the first Community Land Trust in the United States in the 1960s, argued that stable access to land is fundamental to economic justice and community wellbeing. Their work proposed an alternative: land held in trust for communities, with individuals able to own homes or enterprises on long-term leases while the underlying land remains collectively stewarded.

Community Land Trusts have since spread internationally, often associated with affordable housing. But their significance is broader. They represent a structural shift from land as speculative asset towards land as shared foundation.

This matters for contemporary UK debates.

Community Wealth Building approaches emphasise local procurement, anchor institutions and circulating value within regional economies. Neighbourhood planning enables communities to influence spatial development. Place-based funding aims to empower local leadership. Yet without attention to land ownership, these initiatives can struggle to achieve lasting change.

• If land values rise because of successful regeneration, who benefits?
• If community organisations develop assets, can they retain them long term?
• If neighbourhoods build social infrastructure, does ownership align with stewardship?

These questions are becoming more urgent as inequality deepens and housing pressures intensify. They also intersect with emerging conversations about land access; from agricultural succession and rural affordability to urban development and public land disposal.

There are no simple answers. Public acquisition alone cannot solve land inequality, and philanthropic funding is insufficient at scale. But new conversations are emerging internationally around land trusts, cooperative ownership, stewardship models and even land gifting as part of intergenerational transition.

In Scotland, this conversation is moving beyond policy aspiration into legislation. In February 2026, the Scottish Parliament passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Bill, designed to embed a consistent approach to local economic development across the country. The legislation places duties on ministers, local authorities and other public bodies to work together to generate, circulate and retain wealth within local and regional economies; for example through procurement decisions, support for local enterprises and community acquisition of land and buildings. Crucially, it shifts Community Wealth Building from a voluntary approach to a statutory framework, signalling a stronger commitment to economic democracy and local stewardship.

For those working in community engagement and neighbourhood change, this suggests an important shift in perspective.

Participation processes, local partnerships and funding programmes remain essential. But they operate within deeper structural conditions. Sustainable place-based change ultimately depends not only on who participates in decisions, but on who holds the underlying assets and who can influence decisions made about these assets (Lynn, 2018).

At Kingfisher Commons, much of our work sits at this intersection between community knowledge and institutional systems. Again and again, we see that when communities have meaningful influence over land and resources, confidence grows, relationships stabilise and long-term thinking becomes possible.

Which leads to a question that may shape the next decade of place-based policy:

can regeneration move beyond projects and towards stewardship?

Because in the end, thriving neighbourhoods are not only built through investment.

They are sustained through belonging, responsibility and shared ground.