La ciudad de Xalapa se ubica en el municipio del mismo nombre en el centro del estado de Veracruz; junto con cuatro municipios más, conforman la Zona Metropolitana de Xalapa (ZMX), asentada en una región de gran diversidad ecológica, riqueza histórica e importancia económica. La expansión urbana es compleja y abarca múltiples aspectos.

Post-conflict northern Uganda has witnessed an increase in disputes over land. This has, to a great extent, been as a result of the armed conflict and its aftermath. Beyond that, other chaotic factors embedded in various social, legal, economic, and political aspects of this society have influenced the nature, gravity, and dynamics of these disputes and the way in which Traditional Institutions and the Local Council Courts have attempted to resolve them.

Mitchells Plain is about 20km from the Cape Town city centre. It was built in the 1970s as a township for people classified as ‘Coloured’, who were forcibly removed from areas that had been declared ‘whites only’ under the Group Areas Act. Various attempts were made to upgrade the Mitchells Plain Town Centre (MPTC) after the advent of democracy in 1994, but these were disjointed and lacked a champion to drive the process.

Youth Bamboo Shoots Slum School (YBSSS) is a project of VFI Cambodia. 

The goal: to provide a safe and creative place for over 65 children to attend school in the dilapidated slum area near Battambang City's central railway station.

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.

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. 

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.

This case study draws on research into some of the processes through which people access, hold, and trade land in poorer areas of towns and cities. The research was commissioned by Urban LandMark and undertaken by the Isandla Institute, Stephen Berrisford Consulting and Progressus Research and Development. 

The practice of forced eviction is a global phenomenon. Between 1995 and 2005, a survey covering only ten countries, showed that over ten million people were forcibly evicted. These people were left homeless and subject to deeper poverty, discrimination and social exclusion. A number of such evictions involve entire communities of tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. Such communities are invariably evicted against their will and in most cases without any compensation or alternative housing.

All countries have a formal economy and an informal economy. But, on average, in developing countries the relative size of the informal sector is considerably larger than in developed countries. This paper argues that this has important implications for housing policy in developing countries. That most poor households derive their income from informal employment effectively precludes income-contingent transfers as a method of redistribution.