This study was requested by the Ministry for Coordination of Environmental Affairs (MICOA), through the National Directorate of Territorial Planning (DINAPOT) in conjunction with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT); for this purpose, the team of the Cruzeiro do Sul – Research Institute for Development counted with the participation of a group of students of the Master degree course in agricultural development at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering (FAEF) of the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM).

O Perfil Rápido do Sector Urbano para Sustentabilidade (RUSPS) é um processo de avaliação rápida e proactiva de necessidades urbanas e lacunas de capacitação institucional a níveis nacional e das cidades. Esta avaliação está sendo implementada actualmente em mais de 20 países em África e Estados árabes. A metodologia RUSPS consiste em três fases: (1) uma abordagem participativa de perfil urbano, a níveis nacional e local, com enfoque na

Este estudo foi solicitado pelo Ministério para a Coordenação da Acção Ambiental, através da Direcção Nacional de Planeamento e Ordenamento Territorial em conjunto com a Agência HABITAT das Nações Unidas, para a sua realização a equipa do Cruzeiro do Sul – Instituto de Investigação para o Desenvolvimento contou com a participação de um grupo de estudantes do Curso de Mestrado em Desenvolvimento Agrário da Faculdade de Agronomia e Engenharia Florestal da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.

Today, 370 million people live in cities in earthquake prone areas and 310 million in cities with a high probability of tropical cyclones. By 2050 these numbers are likely to more than double, leading to a greater concentration of hazard risk in many of the world's cities. The authors discuss what sets hazard risk in urban areas apart, summarize estimates of valuation of hazard risk, and discuss implications for individual mitigation and public policy.

In less than fifty years, Brazil evolved from a predominantly rural society and economy to a highly urbanized country in which 85 percent of its people now live in urban areas and more than 90 percent of the country’s GDP is generated in the cities. This rapid urbanization process was characterized by a lack of planning and an enduring framework of inequality, resulting in high degrees of concentrated poverty in the urban areas. Much of this urbanization has taken place in metropolitan regions (MRs).

The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and enables children to do homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its environs affect identity and self-respect.

Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This paper disaggregates how parks are built and how they fail. It contextualizes parks in India, followed by a thick case study of an innovative scheme that appears to buck the trend. This performance is then explained by the way in which the scheme's design and action fit India's political economy.

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is not straightforward. Among developing countries, changes in income or industrialization correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This suggests that policy and institutional factors may also influence the urbanization process.

Cities emerge from the spatial concentration of people and economic activities. But spatial concentration is not enough; the economic viability of cities depends on people, ideas, and goods to move rapidly across the urban area. This constant movement within dense cities creates wealth but also various degrees of unpleasantness and misery that economists call negative externalities, such as congestion, pollution, and environmental degradation.

The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration's externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders.

Inexorable urbanization and formalization have been the expectations in development discourse. Indeed, measures of urbanization and formalization have been provided and used as indicators of development. But while urbanization has proceeded apace in developing countries, formalization has slowed significantly over the past quarter century. These disconnect raises questions for development analysis and development policy. Why did one expect urbanization and formalization to go together in the first place?

Housing matters to the livability of cities and to the productivity of their economies. The failure of cities to accommodate the housing needs of growing urban populations can be seen in the proliferation of poorly serviced, high-density informal settlements. Such settlements are not new in the history of rapidly growing cities, their persistence results as much from policies as from economics and demographic transition. Slums have attracted most of the attention on urban housing in developing countries, and the Millennium Development Goals have given prominence to their reduction.