Line Algoed

Line Algoed is an urban anthropologist with 15 years of work and research experience in urban planning, housing, community work and international development. 

Her PhD research explores how communal land ownership in the Caribbean creates an alternative development model that allows communities to control land use, protect the environment and counter displacements, while strengthening themselves to face climate change and having greater control over their recovery from climate change-induced disasters. She focuses on communal land tenure systems in Barbuda and the Caño Martín Peña Community Land Trust in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Both areas have been severely affected by hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017 and are going through radical neoliberal reforms imposed by their governments. 

Her research also looks at regularisation of informal settlements through collective land titling in informal settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean. She studies processes of gentrification in informal settlements and how Community Land Trusts can help tackle displacements through local economic development and community participation in neighbourhood improvement. She is the Lead Researcher in a collaborative research project funded by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to advance new forms of community-owned land and explore the feasibility of new CLT instruments developed by the Caño Martín Peña communities in favelas in Rio de Janeiro Latin America. 

In her work with the Caño Martín Peña international observatory, she promotes peer-to-peer exchanges between community leaders and the South-South transfer of instruments developed through grassroots organisations. She works with the Center for CLT Innovation bringing together current research on Community Land Trusts in a forthcoming collection of essays on new forms of CLTs with a focus on the Global South.