This paper has been compiled by Ndifuna Ukwazi following extensive consultation with practitioners and experts in housing finance, architecture, social housing, city planning, urban design, and local and provincial government.

• There is an accute lack of well-located urban housing that is adequate, secure, and affordable. The global affordable housing gap is currently estimated at 330 million urban households and is forecast to grow by more than 30 percent to 440 million households, or 1.6. billion people, by 2025.

The New Urban Agenda represents a shared vision for a better and more sustainable future – one in which all people have equal rights and access to the benefits and opportunities that cities can offer, and in which the international community reconsiders the urban systems and physical form of our urban spaces to achieve this.

In September 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit adopted a new framework to guide development efforts between 2015 and 2030, entitled “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”.1

Cities function in an efficient, equitable and sustainable manner only when private and public spaces work in a symbiotic relation to enhance each other. Public space generates equality, however in the past decades it has been drastically been reduced. Inadequate, poorly designed, or privatized public spaces generate exclusion and marginalization.

This learning brief suggests that one of the factors limiting the ability of the country to make good on its constitutional obligations relating to land reform is that we, as a country, have a missing middle – smallholder plots – when it comes to land reform.

The Latin American and Caribbean Urban CSO Cluster, part of the Global Land Tools Network (GTLN), together with Habitat for Humanity’s Solid Ground Campaign and the Land Portal Foundation, launched an online debate on Urban Land Conflicts in Latin America and the Caribbean in January 2017. Responding to the common interest to make information easy to access and flow to boost collaboration among stakeholders as a critical basis to improve land governance.

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

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.

Urbanization deserves urgent attention from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many opportunities for social and economic progress. The urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the transition from the Pleistocene to the milder and more stable Holocene interglacial. In 2010, the urban population in developing countries stood at 2.5 billion. The developing world can accommodate the urban population growth and declining urban density in many ways.

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.

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.