Understanding Differences Between Technocratic and Transformative Community Land Trusts: A Case of Divergent Coupling?

Abstract

Community land trusts (CLTs) secure permanently affordable housing and enable community control over urban space. Some CLTs, however, have been criticized for being “technocratic” instead of “transformative.” If some CLTs are systematically more transformative than others, how do the logics and practices they claim to prioritize differ or converge, and to what consequence? Analyzing matched-pair cases of North American CLTs, “transformative” CLTs’ organizational repertoire is more likely to include six identified practices than “technocratic” counterparts. We suggest differences between these two approaches to organizing and governing urban space reflect “divergent coupling,” whereby logics are coupled to practices and discourses in two different ways across organizational subpopulations. We show how the case advances scholars’ claims that joint deployment of urban studies and organization studies yields mutual gains for both fields, with implications for urban policy and politics, as well.