This part of the book deals with land, its ownership, use, allocation and management, and how these relate to urban development and socio-spatial inequality in Finnish cities. Land policy has traditionally been a central means by which public authorities deter uneven development of the built environment and its related inequalities. Over the following chapters I will argue that in recent decades the goals of land policy have changed to such an extent that not only has the target of preventing urban inequality become jeopardised, but new policy goals themselves may also be exacerbating inequalities. Although I will illustrate this with examples, my interest is not in providing extensive data on segregation or mapping the location of classes and ethnic groups. We know from Chapter 2 that there is plenty of this kind of information in studies and reports. Instead, in the chapters that make up this part of the book, I do the following. Chapter 4 explores changes in the means and goals of municipal land policy in three Finnish cities and discusses the ramifications of an increasingly neoliberalised municipal land policy for urban equality. Chapter 5 presents a case study of selling public land in Helsinki that ensued in the development of an exclusive enclave for the wealthy, exacerbating inequality in the city.

When such matters are topics of social scientific research, it is useful to begin by recognising some of the special characteristics of land in general. First and foremost, land is literally matter of existence – it is indispensable for all human activity. Land is scarce. Apart from land reclamations like the Dutch Zuiderzee Works or the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, no more habitable land will ever be available than there already is. Land is also spatially fixed and unique.