This paper examines the various ways in which migrant settlers have gained and maintained access to land in the informal urban settlements of Wewak, the provincial capital of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Urban population growth in PNG and in Pacific Island states more generally is predicted to grow rapidly over the next two decades. Given the limited availability of formal housing for lower income people, it is likely that many will live in informal urban settlements on land owned by customary landowners.

China's success in addressing food problems after adopting the reforms in 1978 has been nothing less than remarkable. Grain output (rice, wheat and maize) has almost doubled and most hunger has been eliminated. Ever since China embarked on its reform agenda more than 30 years ago, its economic growth and poverty reduction have been nothing less than remarkable. Agriculture has been an important contributor to these developments.

Con la crisis del fordismo urbano, el mercado inmobiliario ha resurgido como una fuerza determinante del proceso de coordinación social del uso del suelo y la producción de estructura intraurbana. Es el retorno de la "mano invisible" del mercado. En este artículo se analiza la relación entre la producción de estructura urbana y el funcionamiento del mercado inmobiliario en América Latina, tanto en su versión formal como en la informal.

Urban growth throughout the developing
world has created a challenge for financing infrastructure.
Investment in infrastructure is needed to provide basic
services for newly developed parts of urban areas. It is
needed to meet the demand for a safer and more reliable
water supply, higher standards for the removal and treatment
of wastewater and solid waste, and the transportation
requirements of a population whose expectations of mobility

This paper provides an overview of land reform in South Africa from 1994 to 2011, with the focus on the land redistribution. The government policies and associated implementation since 1994 have not generated expected social and economic results for a number of reasons. Even where land has been transferred, it appears to have had minimal impact on the livelihoods of beneficiaries, largely because of inappropriate project design, a lack of necessary support services and shortages of working capital, leading to widespread underutilization of land.

This study analyzes the difficulties a
poor community experienced in accessing peri-urban land in
South Africa. This community, composed largely of laid-off
farm workers, wanted to buy their own farm in a peri-urban
area west of Johannesburg to establish a mixed-use
settlement. The Ethembalethu 250 families started their own
savings scheme to make their dream a reality. Millions of
black South Africans live in the peri-urban areas. However,

The report has four main parts. In the
first, the commission reviews the 13 economies that have
sustained, high growth in the postwar period. Their growth
models had some common flavors: the strategic integration
with the world economy; the mobility of resources,
particularly labor; the high savings and investment rates;
and a capable government committed to growth. The report
goes on to describe the cast of mind and techniques of

Approaches to urban slums are a
multimedia sourcebook that comprises 14 self-running
audiovisual presentations and 18 video interviews. It is
organized into four broad sections: adaptive approaches,
proactive approaches, case profiles, and thematic
interviews. The sourcebook itself, which contains more than
nine viewing hours of content on CD-ROM, does not exist in
printed format. This guide provides an overview of the

Rural-urban migration is playing an
increasingly important role in shaping the economic and
demographic landscape of Chinese cities. Over the past two
decades, China has transformed itself from a relatively
immobile society to one in which more than 10 percent of the
population are migrants. China's mobility rate is still
low compared with that of advanced industrial economies, the
sheer size of the migrant flows and their dramatic economic

This book, Financing cities, emphasized
case studies on different topics to look at the interactions
of a range of variables and factors and to see how they fit
together. Rather than require each case to follow the same
format, the authors have structured their papers around the
issues that matter most from their perspective in addressing
the topic in hand. The first part of this book presents case
studies describing the framework established at the national

At the outset of China's reform
period, the country had a far higher poverty rate than for
Africa as a whole. Within five years that was no longer
true. This paper tries to explain how China escaped from a
situation in which extreme poverty persisted due to failed
and unpopular policies. While acknowledging that Africa
faces constraints that China did not, and that context
matters, two lessons stand out. The first is the importance

China has been the most successful developing country in this modern era of globalization. Since initiating economic reform after 1978, its economy has expanded at a steady rate over 8 percent per capita, fueling historically unprecedented poverty reduction (the poverty rate declined from over 60 percent to 7 percent in 2007). Other developing countries struggling to grow and reduce poverty are naturally interested in what has been the source of this impressive growth and what, if any, lessons they can take from China.