Exploring the role of multi modal smartphone technologies in Land Title Registration for the Crofters of Northern Scotland

‘Instead of traditional, slow and expensive approach to land registration, can efficiently and effectively give this task to the land owner using smart phone technology?’ This is the research question behind this 3 year PhD studentship, jointly funded by Ordnance Survey and The School of GeoSciences at The University of Edinburgh, supervised by William Mackaness and Jamie Cross in Social and Political Science.

Land registration is important in land tenure security and reduces land-related issues such as boundary conflicts and land grabbing. But the creation of a land register is costly requiring specialist equipment and expertise, recorded within legal frameworks. Can we instead employ volunteered geographic information approaches as a cheaper and more immediate alternative? Can a combination of audio, video, and boundary capture techniques based around smartphone technologies be used to record a more complete and robust source of land registration and thus enable individual land owners and tenants to take land registration into their own hands.

This project will investigate the extent to which such tools are meaningful for land registration, with the Scottish crofting community as a case study – exploring a range of socio technical issues (such as resistance to technology, and the resilience of crowd sourced data within legal frameworks). Crofters are tenants of Scottish crofts, which are agricultural units of less than 50 hectares in size, falling under specific legislation. While a former register of crofts – without a spatial information component attached – is available, digital, map-based croft registration is far from complete: (only 15% of an estimated
20 000 crofts have been entered in the new Crofting Register).

The project will build upon the initial implementation and testing of an Android application – the results of which showed that smartphone-based VGI can indeed be collected by individuals for land registration. Using user centered approaches, this research would address issues of 1) compromise between ease of use and functionality, 3) positional accuracy, 4) corroboration, 5) conflict resolution and 6) incentives for use (beyond just the benefit of registration). There is the interesting tension between technology, the digital divide and purposeful off-grid communities. Such research has broader application among developing countries where cadastral systems are in their infancy and expertise and specialist equipment are scarce. More broadly the research reflects a pragmatic need to fundamentally explore different ways of documenting and securing land tenure.

The skills required to undertake this research therefore span the technical (in the design implementation, evaluation of field rugged solutions) AND the social dimension (robustness of mixed methodology approaches to gathering cadastral information able to withstand legal scrutiny).

The studentship would seek to commence in April 2017. Further information can be provided by Dr William Mackaness: [Email Address Removed] 01316508163