Thesis Title:
Room for All? Transformative Property Rights
Thesis Abstract:
What is possible? This project asks to stretch the answer to this question through the lens of real utopianism—the effort to imagine and build institutions that expand the limits of what seems achievable. Centred on the housing crisis, it explores how property law might be rethought to address its structural roots in insecurity, scarcity, and inequality. Property law is not a neutral framework but a system that organises social relations—shaping how people live together, how resources are shared, and how power circulates within society. Yet within this system, there are existing and emerging models that challenge dominant market logics and reveal alternative ways of organising collective life.
The research asks two guiding questions. First, what legal, social, and cultural mechanisms allow such alternatives to endure and function in practice? Second, why do initiatives that work in one context often struggle to expand or take root elsewhere?
Bringing together legal analysis and utopian theory, the project reimagines property law as a dynamic field of experimentation rather than a fixed set of rules. It argues that responses to the housing crisis can act as laboratories for possible futures—partial, practical, and real—stretching the boundaries of what law can enable in the organisation of social life.
Primary Supervisor:
Prof Davina Cooper & Dr Yael Lifshitz
Publications:
- Chen First, Are the Laws Still Poor? Reflections on the Right to Work Limiting the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living. LSE Law Review, 8(3), 322–367 (2023).