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.

The study provides the background and objectives of the Athens workshop, then provides separate in-depth background and analysis of the informal development solutions being adopted in Albania and Greece. Following a review of just how ‘pro-poor’ the solutions are, the final chapter provides a series of lessons learned, many of which can be applied to other countries experiencing informal development issues.

This Handbook introduces key economic and related concepts explaining the functioning of urban land markets. You will find in this Handbook tools for engaging in a critical analysis of conventional economics, particularly in the understanding of how African urban land markets work. Of great importance is the understanding of how land use, supply and demand unfold in African context. It provides a basis for strengthening urban policy in ways that enable poorer people in African cities to access well-located living and work spaces.

El trabajo parte de la reflexión sobre los vínculos entre capitalismo global y urbanización, específicamente de las transformaciones producidas en los territorios metropolitanos en las últimas dos décadas. En particular, se observa la difusión de urbanizaciones cerradas de tipo polderizado -UCP-, nuevas formas de producción de ámbitos residenciales en los bordes del aglomerado metropolitano de Buenos Aires, cuyo despliegue supone una demanda extensiva de suelo sobre áreas de gran valor patrimonial y fragilidad ambiental, como los humedales de la cuenca baja del Río Luján.

Much of São Paulo’s urban expansion is driven by the development of informal settlements on its periphery, which includes the catchment areas that provide important environmental services such as open space and catchments for drinking water reservoirs. In such areas, governance of land, water services and water resources, traditionally administered separately, are in fact interdependent.

Due to urban growth, some agricultural lands have been replaced by residential, municipal, and industrial areas. In some cases the remaining agricultural land will not have enough water because of transfers from agriculture to M''I (municipal and industrial) users. Therefore, in many places, especially in arid and semi-arid regions, the use of treated wastewater as a reliable source of irrigation water has already been, or will be, considered in the future.

Land use activities change the natural functions of a watershed impacting the flow of water and water quality, and impair aquatic ecosystems. Optimal allocation of land use depends on attributes related to terrestrial and aquatic environments. A dynamic model that links land use, overland flow, suspended sediment, and an aquatic species is used to evaluate alternate land use policies. The dwarf wedge mussel that is classified as endangered in the region is used as an indicator species of aquatic health in a watershed in Massachusetts.

Previous studies have found that urbanization often decreases net primary production (NPP), an important integrative measure of ecosystem functioning. In arid environments, however, urbanization may boost productivity by introducing highly productive plant communities and weakening the coupling of plant growth to naturally occurring cycles of water and nutrients. We tested these ideas by comparing NPP estimated for natural and anthropogenic land covers in the Phoenix metropolitan region of USA using MODIS NDVI data and a simplified parametric NPP model.

Local land-use policy is increasingly being recognized as fundamental to biodiversity conservation in the United States. Many planners and conservation scientists have called for broader use of planning and regulatory tools to support the conservation of biodiversity at local scales. Yet little is known about the pervasiveness of these practices. We conducted an on-line survey of county, municipal, and tribal planning directors (n =116) in 3 geographic regions of the United States: metropolitan Seattle, Washington; metropolitan Des Moines, Iowa; and the Research Triangle, North Carolina.

The composition of a landscape is a fundamental indicator in land-cover pattern assessments. The objective of this paper was to evaluate a landscape composition indicator called 'landscape mosaic' as a framework for interpreting land-cover dynamics over a 9-year period in a 360,000 km2 study area in the southern United States. The indicator classified a land parcel into one of 19 possible landscape mosaic classes according to the proportions of natural, developed, and agriculture land-cover types in a surrounding 4.41-ha neighborhood.

As urban development continues to encroach on the natural and rural landscape, land-use planners struggle to identify high priority conservation areas for protection. Although knowing where urban-sensitive species may be occurring on the landscape would facilitate conservation planning, research efforts are often not sufficiently designed to make quality predictions at unknown locations. Recent advances in occupancy modeling allow for more precise estimates of occupancy by accounting for differences in detectability.

Soil loss is a major concern for land managers due to its influence on biomass production, surface water quality and landscape beauty. In Somalia, the risk of soil loss is accelerated by the removal of vegetation, bad land use practices and negative impacts of urbanization. The political upheavals and consequent insecurity in the country are major limitations for detailed database and research in soil loss.