Subdivision of joint tenure in agricultural communities: customary land rights management in Slovenia

Abstract

This paper presents the process of real estate reallocation as a mass cadastral subdivision process of agrarian communities’ customary rights. The agricultural communities have existed for centuries and have been jointly owning and using the common land. Such gatherings were developed mainly due to the unique requirements deriving from land use and relief characteristics, such as joint forest management on mountain slopes. The main objective of this research has been to analyse the process of real estate subdivision, which has its legal background in Slovenian legislation. In this paper, the process of cadastral subdivision of land owned by agricultural communities is presented as a mass cadastral land subdivision process: from preparatory work to the new geometric structure of the common land. The cadastral, organisational, and engineering role of the chartered surveying engineer and the surveying company is examined. An aim of the paper is, inter alia, to develop a conceptual model of the process that will serve as a basis for optimisation, for a more just and more efficient distribution of assets among community members. The course of the individual steps of the community established land subdivision is shown with unified modelling language (UML) activity diagrams. As a case study, we have considered the subdivision of the property of the agricultural community of Zgornja Sorica in Slovenia.

Keywords

• common land
• agrarian communities
• customary rights
• cadastral rearrangement
• land management
• mass land subdivision
• unified modelling language (uml)