Resource information
The first paper of this section
(Durand-Laserve) documents how increasing pressures on urban
land and the 'commodification' of shelter and
settlement has increased 'market evictions' of
families holding intermediate tide to property, although
international declarations and pressures have contributed to
reducing 'forced evictions.' The second paper
(Mooya and Cloete) uses the tools of the New Institutional
Economics to analyze the argument in Hernando DeSoto's
path-breaking book, The Mystery of Capital, that full legal
tide is the key to turning 'dead capital' in the
form of informal property held by many low-income families
into an economic asset and to detonating broad-based
economic growth. The paper concludes that intermediate forms
of tenure can have the virtues of full legal tide if
properly constructed, and then examines the case of Namibia
in this context. The third paper (Fernandes) documents and
assesses the recent efforts of the Brazilian federal
Ministry of Cities to develop a comprehensive approach for
regularizing title throughout that country. In the fourth
paper, Abramo gives a structural and theoretical over-view
of informal settlement in Brazil. The fifth paper (Rakodi)
looks at traditional land delivery systems in five
medium-sized Sub-Saharan African cities, and concludes that
policies and programs can build on their strengths.
