Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 79, Spring 2000, p. 2
What strikes me as I reflect on LTC this spring is how obviously central our mission is, no matter the locale.
In late March the College of Agriculture conducted its annual Issues Forum. The subject: conflicts over agricultural land use in Wisconsin. While 150 people pre-registered, over 200 showed up for a day of spirited and oftentimes controversial presentations and discussions about the roles and rights of governments, property owners, and citizens.
The front pages of daily papers throughout the world have been filled with stories about the political turmoil in Zimbabwe and its roots in the controversy over landownership and land reform. LTC research scientists just returned from there, beginning our multi-year project on this very topic.
This academic year our brown bag seminar series has drawn record attendance from campus and community members, as usual our publication series elicits strong interest from a global audience, and more visitors than we can accommodate request residencies at LTC.
Upon this base we are moving forward with a set of new initiatives and new institutional relations.
We are moving to establish new linkages with organizations such as Oxfam America (because of the obvious link between landownership, poverty, and hunger), the Center for Property Studies at the University of New Brunswick and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia (over issues of native people’s land tenure, and public education and training over the very meaning of landownership in the 21st century), and a set of Norwegian research institutes and university centers (relative to a mutual interest in southern Africa, and cross-national research on city-based strategies for the management of urban sprawl).
These new relationships contribute to an ongoing process of redefining LTC for the new millennium. We are developing a strategic plan for what will we do, how we will do it, and with whom we will do it. As part of this I am working closely with the LTC Advisory Committee to reconfigure our internal relationship to UW–Madison.
This is an exciting time for LTC. I welcome your ideas for how we can best grow and change to stay ever relevant to land tenure matters in all their dimensions.
Copyright © 2000 by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
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