More than half the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are affected by a peculiar issue of tenurial ambiguity called “orange areas.” This issue impacts nearly 1.2 million hectares and 1.5 million, largely poor, landless and tribal families, that depend on these lands for food, fuel, fodder and other sources of income. This lack of tenurial clarity also impacts forest protection outcomes in the state and constrains the achievement of biodiversity, water and climate targets.

Rapidly urbanizing Indian cities need mechanisms to ensure that land is acquired, planned, and serviced with adequate infrastructure and social amenities, to prevent the occurrence of haphazard urban expansion and under-provisioned inner-city areas.

Such mechanisms should help government agencies recover their costs through land value capture, a method by which agencies recover part of the increase in the value of private property after it is serviced by new public infrastructure.

Climate change affects poor and marginalized communities first and hardest. Particularly in cities, a lack of access to basic services, a long history of unsustainable urban development, and political exclusion render the urban poor one of the most vulnerable groups to climate induced natural hazards and disasters. Yet strategies focused on reducing these people’s vulnerability to climate change often overlook crucial differences in their needs and situations.

This article discusses the nexus between urban planning and the law in theory, and the role that law plays in the urban planning process in Kenya. The theoretical discussion focuses on the use of law as a regulatory mechanism and concludes that no universal theory of the role of law in the urban planning process can be identified. The discussion on law and urban planning in Kenya, on the other hand, is an attempt to apply theory to the Kenyan situation. In Kenya today, there exists a private and a public legal regime for the regulation of land use in urban areas.

Ruiru subcounty has witnessed increased changes from its initial agricultural land use to a more urbanized residential and commercial land use. These land-use and land-cover changes affect directly and indirectly the environment, economy and society at Ruiru subcounty, Kiambu county and Kenya in general. Although their impacts have been recognized long ago, it‟s only a few years back that they became a cause of countrywide concern.

Land -use Conflict and in-optimal Spatial Patterns in Peri-urban Areas of the City of Nairobi,Kenya

Greenways are multifunctional linear landscapes that provide a range of socio-ecological benefits. As a domain of landscape planning research, greenways gained traction in the late 20th century and today, there is substantial interest in greenway planning and design. This is especially true in urban areas, as noted at the sixth Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning.

Since Vietnam shifted to a market-economy in the 1980s, Hanoi has seen rapid urban expansion similar to that of other South East Asian cities - involving megaprojects, luxury developments, rural-to-urban migration, informal housing construction, and escalating speculation. Researchers have considered how unemployment and the disruption of community life followed the urbanization of rural areas. However, little has been said about how people adjusted their everyday life to cope with the changes.

During the post-reform period since 1986, land-use systems in Vietnam have been reformed in terms of the regulation of land markets and the built environment. This study analyzes the changing role of urban planning and the policy of state intervention in land markets to manage spatial changes in Vietnamese cities. Theoretical and empirical approaches are used to analyze urban development and planning practices in Hanoi. The study further describes the constraints of planning systems in hybrid land markets that include both formal and informal land development.

Cambodian human rights organizations estimate that more than half a million people have been affected by land rights issues. Land conflict in Cambodia is a clear manifestation of structural violence affecting communities which are almost exclusively low income and home to indigenous and ethnic minorities. This article explores the complex interplay of actors, particularly women and youth, in land rights social mobilization (LRSM) in Cambodia, focusing on urban Boeung Kak Lake and rural Areng Valley.

Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of ‘Turning Land into Capital’ (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from ‘state land’. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than the compensation provided to landowners.

Economic and legal reforms have triggered waves of conflict over property rights and access to urban land in Vietnam. In this article I develop four epistemic case studies to explore the main precepts and practices that courts must negotiate to extend their authority over land disputes. Courts face a dilemma: Do they apply state laws that disregard community regulatory practices and risk losing social relevance, or apply community notions of situational justice that undermine rule formalism?