Informal settlements in areas that are already disaster prone are an increasing problem. Climate adaptation is also often used as an excuse fo evictions to redevelop sites in a more climate-proof manner in what is often referred to as ‘climate gentrification. Nature-based solutions to climate change, such as increasing green spaces, may increase home values, but the question of who benefits from these initiatives arises. How can the side effects of climate interventions that can lead to inequality, such as increase in value, be avoided?

In the six months since the coronavirus began its global spread, more than 15 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 600,000 have perished, causing governments around the world to institute lockdowns and shut down businesses while entire industries have been devastated.

Evictions have emerged as the most common housing, land and property risk globally associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in spite of the fact that access to adequate housing is essential to reduce the spread of the virus. This arises due to a combination of factors, the main one being the suspension and loss of livelihoods on a massive scale resulting from public health prescriptions resulting in an inability to pay rent. Opportunistic actors (governments, armed groups, and landlords) may also use this crisis to evict people from houses, camps and informal settlements.

Every day since Pres Ramaphosa was elected into office we have searched out South African land-related news which is curated on our website knowledgebase.land. This publication provides a brief summary of land news across a range of categories for March 2020

This paper was written as part of the research initiative entitled Engaging the Business Community as a New Peacebuilding Actor. It is a joint project of the Africa Centre for Dispute Settlement (ACDS), CDA Collaborative Learning Projects (CDA), and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This research paper attempts
to
explore the potential
of
modern digital Geoinformation technologies (GITs)
as
alternative
tools for spatial mapping, planning and management
is
compared against the hitherto used cadastral
–
based approaches
in
Keny, and
Nairobi City settlements
in
particular. Using a case study
of
Mlolongo Township, a
ty
pical peri-urban settlement
of
Nairobi, the potential
of
GITs
is

The aim of this policy paper is to present successful approaches to secure land tenure rights in rural and urban areas. To support future programmatic decisions by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), this paper focusses especially on impacts and good practices. It discusses examples from the German technical cooperation but also includes good practices and impacts achieved by other development partners.

These documents summarise Urban LandMark's approach to incrementally securing tenure in informal settlements. This approach emphasises practical mechanisms that allow land rights to be upgraded over time. It has been developed from a range of activities, including input from research papers, a considerable number of interviews, and the testing of different processes with municipalities. The second report focuses on the notion of local land offices and their potential for promoting tenure security and incremental tenure processes. 

This document, written by Josette Cole of the Mandlovu Development Trust, explores the intended and unintended consequences of home ownership for poor citizens living in formal settlements in post-apartheid South Africa. It focuses on New Crossroads in Cape Town, a relatively small, urban community of 20 000 people.

Participatory and inclusive land readjustment, or PILaR for short, is a way of reorganizing the ownership of land in and around cities in a pro-poor way. It brings together land parcels belonging to different owners and treats them as a single unit for planning and infrastructure provision. The municipality reserves a portion of the land for roads and other public infrastructure, and returns the rest to the original owners. Each owner gets back a smaller parcel, but it is worth more because it now has road access and other services.

Handling Land in the New Urban Agenda

Handling Land in the New Urban Agenda