Luanda’s Post-war Land Markets: Reducing Poverty by Promoting Inclusion

Almost 40 years of war in Angola forced millions of people fleeing rural areas to seek a safe haven in the capital and to settle in informal slum settlements (musseques) on the periphery of Luanda. The new urban migrants created homes and settlements on land that they purchased in good faith but for which they could get no legal title. Now, they face eviction threats due to commercial interests and government infrastructure expansion. With a population today approaching of over six million, Luanda is Africa’s fastest growing and fifth largest city. A decade of post-war rapid economic growth, fuelled by rising commodity prices, has seen GDP per capita grow eightfold, but poverty reduction has not kept apace. The poor, representing over 50 % of the population, have benefited little from the ‘peace dividend’. The Angolan Government has promised to build one million homes country-wide before the 2012 elections and aims to eliminate much of the musseque in the process. However, the government’s urban plans remain hindered by a weak administration and little national implementation capacity. Despite the government’s assertion as the unique owner and manager of all land, there exists a thriving real-estate market for both formal (titled) and informally occupied land. Most urban residents with weak or non-existent tenure rights benefit little from increasing land values and are susceptible to being forcibly removed and increasingly obliged to occupy environmentally risky flood-prone areas. This paper presents the results of work on property markets in Luanda that permit a better understanding of the nature and economic value of land and identify the problems and potentials the market has to offer. The paper argues for a major reform in public land policy, recognising the legitimacy of common practices in land acquisition and long-term occupation in good faith. Inclusive land management, adapting to both formal and existing informal markets, can contribute to the improvement of urban settlement conditions and economic wellbeing of the poor in post-war Luanda.     

Peri-urban agriculture in Barcelona: outlining landscape dynamics vis à vis socio-environmental functions

Dispersed urbanisation promotes complex relationships between rural areas and the urban fringe, with emerging new functions for peri-urban agriculture (PUA). Although PUA is a type of productive farming of interest for urban planning due to its recognised functions, comparative analyses are needed to relate farm dynamics to fringe landscape modifications in different socio-economic contexts. Given the current limitation of specific methodologies to analyse PUA dynamics, a quantitative approach profiling farm types and the related landscape structure in an expanding urban region, the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, is proposed. Results indicate that PUA is based on five typologies with different territorial values, as a consequence of diverse economic relevance, socio-environmental weight and landscape prominence. Based on these results, a conservation strategy aimed at preserving the residual PUA landscape is proposed through the promotion of a polycentric functional network of farming with natural vegetation.     

PREVI-Lima’s Time: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project

Launched in 1968, the PREVI-Lima housing competition brought informal urbanisation to the attention of architects worldwide. The competition brief required the design of low-rise, high-density expandable homes, grouped in neighbourhoods. Here Sharif S Kahatt puts PREVI’s experimental project within the social, political and theoretical context of the time. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Local Climate Governance under the Shadow of Hierarchy: Evidence from China’s Yangtze River Delta

This study examines the making of local climate governance in the Chinese setting where central-local inter-governmental relations continue to play critical part in almost every policy domain. Through analysing the climate responses of the three provincial-level governments at the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), the paper argues that the process of “experimentation under hierarchy” is relevant to understanding the evolving of the subnational climate regime in the YRD region. We find the preponderance of the central authorities in initiating national climate strategies and galvanising responses at the local level. Meanwhile, provincial governments have been able to leverage climate plans and actions to achieve their own gains. These findings suggest that any optimism about subnational climate activism in a Chinese setting has to be mixed with caution. In fact, the shadow of hierarchical authority structure lingers and plays important part in the initiation of subnational response and spurring climate responses and innovations from below.     

‘Agitating people’s brains’: Noulan Cauchon and the City Scientific in Canada’s capital

Noulan Cauchon (1872–1935) was a founder of the Town Planning Institute of Canada and the Ottawa Town Planning Commission. He played a significant role in the planning of Canada’s capital city in the early twentieth century. This article traces the evolution of Cauchon’s planning ideas and their place within the Canadian planning profession, based upon his numerous public lectures, newspaper and journal articles. He was a close ally of Thomas Adams during the 1914‐26 campaign to extend town planning across Canada. Cauchon’s background as a railway engineer influenced his City Scientific approach to planning, which contrasted with the City Beautiful proposals for the capital produced for the federal government. This City Scientific approach became the dominant mode of planning in Canada after 1918. Cauchon produced a comprehensive zoning by‐law and many small‐scale planning schemes for the Ottawa area. Few of his proposals were implemented by the municipality, which deferred to the national government on most planning issues during this period. But Cauchon’s ideas influenced the early evolution of the profession in Canada and the redevelopment of the national capital after 1945.     

Private land: conservation’s new frontier in America

Conservation in North America has proceeded through three discernible stages in the last 125 years. Moving from a response to unregulated commercial harvest and wildlife depletion, it matured into a science based institution that was largely driven by government policy and supported by organized conservation groups. Protecting significant regions by setting them aside as National Parks or otherwise protected landscapes was a significant aspect of conservation throughout its first and second phases. A new and effective paradigm of private lands conservation initiatives has now arisen to face modern conservation challenges in North America.     

Urbanizing villages: informal morphologies in Shenzhen’s urban periphery

The phenomenon of urban villages in China has received much scholarly attention in recent years, mostly about their socio-economic aspects and its role in accommodating rural migrants. While the link between the socio-economic functioning and the morphology of urban villages has been recognized, detailed spatial research, and morphological research in particular, is limited. Morphological research has generally focused on either rural villages or centrally located urban villages and much of the peri-urbanity that constitutes the majority of informal development in China remains under-researched. This paper explores the morphologies of urbanizing villages in Shenzhen’s urban periphery, with a particular focus on the distinctions between the old village core and newly built expansions. The paper opens up a series of questions about the morphology and morphogenetic processes of these villages and establishes a framework for future enquiry. How do we understand the informalized planning mechanisms in urban villages? How do we explain the morphological variation of urban villages? Are the processes that characterize urban villages restricted to the Chinese context or is there scope for regional comparison?     

Post-Socialist Housing Systems in Europe: Housing Welfare Regimes by Default?

This article develops a conceptual framework derived from welfare regime and concomitant literatures to interpret housing reform in post-socialist European countries. In it, settled power structures and collective ideologies are necessary prerequisites for the creation of distinctive housing welfare regimes with clear roles for the state, market and households. Although the defining feature of post-socialist housing has been mass-privatisation to create super-homeownership societies, the emphatic retreat of the state that this represents has not been replaced by the creation of the institutions or cultures required to create fully financialised housing markets. There is, instead, a form of state legacy welfare in the form of debt-free home-ownership, which creates a gap in housing welfare that has been partially filled by households in the form of intergenerational assistance (familialism) and self-build housing. Both of these mark continuities with the previous regime. The latter is especially common in south-east Europe where its frequent illegality represents a form of anti-state housing. The lack of settled ideologies and power structures suggests that these housing welfare regimes by default will persist as part of a process that resembles a path-dependent ‘transformation’ rather than ‘transition’.     

What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces,the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration

Migrants’ constructions of their domestic spaces, and their struggle to feel at home in both receiving and sending societies, are an emerging focus of research in migration studies. Housing issues are also a privileged observatory on their transnational social engagement, as well as on the changing boundaries of their membership and belonging. This article addresses the everyday bases of their home-making and house-building practices, drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy. What can be inferred from the ways in which migrants inhabit their houses “here”, while typically investing in better housing arrangements “there”, as to their alignment towards either society? What do their housing-related practises suggest about the potential to feel locally and transnationally at home, given the structural constraints they are subject to? By tracing the meanings, enactments and locations of migrants’ home, I aim to advance the debate on home and migration in two respects: the persistent materiality which underlies the home experience, and the significance of migrants’ houses, particularly in sending societies, as a window on the mixed social consequences of migration.     

‘Land for infrastructure’ in Ho Chi Minh City: land-based financing of transportation improvement

This paper explores how land-based financing mechanisms are currently used in Ho Chi Minh City as a public-private funding strategy. The Land-for-Infrastructure (LFI) mechanism appears as a solution to produce infrastructures. We found that the implementation of the LFI mechanism remains difficult, but eventually can lead to success. By ‘trial-error-transcend,’ the City managed to build two essential roads while the developers received attractive investment opportunities in urban development. This mechanism cannot, however, be seen as a panacea for the local authorities due to constraints to replicate it and potential undesired ‘side effects.’     

Shifting Boundaries of Sexual Identities in Cape Town: The Appropriation and Malleability of ‘Gay’ in Township Spaces

While much has been written concerning the effect of the post-apartheid transition upon gay communities in predominantly more affluent parts of South Africa, little is still known about how this transition affected black African residents in the former townships. This article therefore examines the impact that the political transition had on groups in the former townships through an exploration that highlights first the way it helped create delineated sexual binary relationships. It will then go on to explore how the social expression of these binary relationships has a unique geography within the former townships which in turn also allows us to see how an historically very Westerncentric term of identification ‘gay’ has been appropriated in unique ways.     

Performing the Primitive in the Postcolony: Nyoni’s Kraal in Cape Town

The production of particular spaces for tourist consumption of the “exotic” other involves the performance of particular conceptualizations of people and places that recreates theatrical versions of the primitive. Through analysis of one such space—Nyoni’s Kraal in Cape Town—we contend that both hosts and visitors are complicit in the construction of these spaces and imaginaries. To this end, practices of social and spatial policing as well as performativity and representations of cultural constructs of an “authentic Africa” are deployed in the projection of a specific form of constructed, “benign” multiculturalism. We contend that such practices reproduce a mythical idyll of Africa for consumption that recreates—rather than questions—colonial power structures, and therefore remain imbued with the inequitable and uncertain outcomes of modernity.

The Two Facets of Lesotho’s Urban Land Law and Implications for Planning

Critical research and analysis of the link between urban development, urban law and judicial decisions in the cities of Sub-Saharan Africa is limited. Drawing on lessons from Maseru, Lesotho, this paper advances a critical analysis of the link between urban law, judicial decisions and urban development. The paper suggests that Lesotho’s urban land law, the Land Act of 1979 (LA 1979) has two facets. The first facet is that LA 1979 is exclusionary because in terms of access to urban housing land, it discriminates between individuals on the basis of their socioeconomic wealth and access to those who wield state power. The second facet is that LA 1979 is ostensibly empowering, as it has permitted urban residents who have acquired urban housing land through informal delivery processes to challenge state attempts to appropriate their land without compensation. The paper notes that the first facet has remained significantly unchanged since the enactment of LA 1979 in June 1980, while the second facet only emerged in 1993, when constitutional rule was reinstated after nearly 23 years of autocratic regimes. The paper concludes that the reinstatement of constitutional rule in 1993 has permitted the courts to reinterpret the rules-of-the-game in ways that have privileged the rights of ordinary urban residents over those of the state. In the process, the judiciary has established solid foundations for transparent, accountable, and participatory urban planning and governance, a culture that the planning profession in Lesotho is yet to internalise.

Growth and degradation in the Orient’s ‘Las Vegas’: issues of environment in Macau

This paper argues that the rapid growth of gambling‐related tourism and urban construction in Macau has given rise to serious environmental degradation. The major environmental issues include air quality, water supply, solid waste disposal, noise prevention, heritage conservation and environmental management. The author suggests that the government in Macau should refocus this city’s development direction and commit itself to sustainable development. At the policy‐making level, there are such urgent issues as integration of environmental, economic and urban planning with community participation in decision‐making; enhancement of environmental legislation and institutions; implementing vital measures to control of the numbers of visitors; developing a mass transport system; and protecting the city’s cultural heritage.