4. Conclusion

Intentional ecological communities like Jindibah, and the practice of developer-negotiated contracts for embedded networks, demonstrate an essential lesson for climate conscious lawyers, flagged at the chapter’s outset: lawyers must understand law properly to ensure that their work has tangible, beneficial outcomes and to guard against the law’s misuse. This is particularly important in the context of high-density and master planned housing, which create unparalleled opportunities for the collective ownership of sustainability infrastructure but which rely on technical legislation that is open to abuse. Lawyers need to understand the mischief that the orthodox prohibition on positive obligations on freehold land sought to avoid — namely, current landowners controlling future landowners’ use and imposing financial obligations on them that benefit the original owner and/or their associates. Although that rule needed to be overcome to ensure the proper running and maintenance of collectively owned housing, as property theorist Carol Rose famously warned, in ‘devising new strategies in an old war among generations of land owners … we should not be overly surprised if we wind up in some of the same old trenches’.^[1] By allowing original owners, typically developers, to create rules and obligations for future landowners, we have permitted the mischief the foundational rule of property law sought to avoid.

However, with properly drafted and enforced legislation preventing owner abuse, strata and community title can produce positive social and environmental outcomes, as a community like Jindibah demonstrates. With baseline legislative provisions that safeguard against socially and environmentally regressive rules, private citizens should be empowered by property law to create and regulate housing to higher environmental standards, making positive contributions to climate action, one community at a time.