A recent story from NPR described how slum mapping can be a powerful negotiating tool when used as a public record of problems such as dark street corners, limited toilets, or illegal dumping. In one of the largest slums in Nairobi, Kenya – home to an estimated 200,000 people – maps of slum areas enabled community members and authorities to identify available space to lay municipal water pipes. Around the world, slums lack street names, addresses, and, due to their informal nature, property rights.

This paper examines determinants and consequences of migration from urban slums using panel data from two Nairobi slums. We analyze migration behavior of both adults and children. First, empirical analysis of labor market dynamics shows that schooling is complementary with experience (measured by duration in Nairobi) in slums jointly increasing the probability of migration to non-slum urban areas, and that labor-market returns to schooling and experience are low within slums.

The young man was scared. The city government had instructed him to count the shacks in the settlement. He arrived smartly dressed carrying a briefcase and clipboard with pen in hand and a list of the shacks. His job was to find any new shacks without the official number painted on the door. But he immediately ran into problems. The local residents confronted him, asking what he was doing. Soon a small crowd had gathered. They took him into the community hall, where a meeting was under way. He explained that the city had sent him, but the local people were suspicious.

This publication is the second report of the Advisory Group on Forced Evictions (AGFE) to the Executive Director of UN-Habitat. It contains follow-up information on eviction cases documented in the first report, 15 new cases, and a detailed analysis of the current global situation regarding forced evictions and successful counterstrategies, methodologies and tools to stop and prevent forced evictions.

This publication is a summary report of the seminar "Improving Slum Conditions through Innovative Financing", which was jointly organized by the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and took place in Stockholm, Sweden on 16–17 June 2008. This two-day seminar, which was dedicated to adequate and affordable housing for all, was an integrated part of the FIG Working Week.

Most developing countries have less than 30 percent cadastral coverage. This means that over 70 percent of the land in many countries is generally outside the land register. This has caused enormous problems for example in cities, where over one billion people live in slums without proper water, sanitation, community facilities, security of tenure or quality of life. This has also caused problems for countries with regard to food security and rural land management issues.

As India continues to urbanize and move
towards a less agricultural- and more industry-based
economy, land demands will continue to grow. Its urban
population is expected to increase by more than 200 million
by 2030, requiring 4 to 8 million hectares of land for
residential use alone. Demands for infrastructure and
industry could add a similar amount, summing to total land
demand of 5 to10 percent of the land area currently used for

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

Evidence is mounting that secure
property rights have positive effects for poor people in
general and women in particular. The aim of this report is
to review what is known about women s access to and control
over land and real property in urban settings, identifying
approaches to strengthening property rights that enhance
women s agency, and sharing key lessons. Section two
synthesizes the evidence on urban women s priorities with

This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation.

With rapid urbanization and an
increasing number of publicly-funded urban projects, there
is a growing demand to address complex land acquisition and
involuntary resettlement issues in urban settings. A variety
of major urban projects in areas such as urban development,
renewal or upgrading, urban transport, urban watershed
management, water supply and sanitation, and urban solid
waste management require substantial land acquisition and

Afghanistan is one of the poorest and
longest suffering countries among members of the World Bank,
and has been ravaged by chronic conflict and political
instability. Afghanistan's infrastructure has been
destroyed or degraded; its human resource base severely
depleted; and its social capital eroded. Despite existing
public administration structures, the majority of state
institutions are only beginning to function effectively, and