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Paper short abstract:

Following extensive urban expansion, Ulaanbaatar residents accessing property engage in forms of dwelling to assert rights to land. Temporary possession provides avenues for residents to reconceptualise place and belonging, challenging manifestations of power within municipal and national politics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will examine how residents in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, conceptualise and diversify understandings of political power and influence in Ulaanbaatar. Following varied postsocialist land tenure reforms after 1990, the capital of Mongolia has become a space whereby mobile pastoralist usufructuary land access has shaped the unfolding of postsocialist urban land privatisation. There now exists gradations of legal categories of land access, spanning forms of temporary possession or ezemshil to outright ‘permanent’ ownership or ömchlöl. Within these larger categories exist other use rights, including protecting land as a way of ‘holding’ it in place. In practice, what has arisen is a malleable urban space whereby forms of ‘holding’ land in place through the act of dwelling on land or having other dwell on it for you, have become paramount ways in which residents exercise land use rights. Dwelling forms a fundamental way people acquire and keep land as a type of expanding investment or höröngö, whether financial or as a home.

Following extensive forms of outsourced private development as well as increasing land prices over the past decade, Ulaanbaatar residents negotiating access to property have heavily drawn on forms of dwelling in order to assert the right (erh) to land. Here, forms of temporary possession provide avenues for residents to reconceptualise space, place, and belonging in different areas of the city. Dwelling forms part of residential political counternarratives that can challenge developers, bureaucrats and manifestations of power within interlinked municipal and national political spheres.