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Lecture

African Urbanization: Informal Settlements Restructuring

Description

This lecture explores the dimensions of land, the production sectors, land rights, and the challenges related to urban restructuring in African cities. It discusses the various aspects of land, including its economic, legal, political, and symbolic dimensions, as well as the complexities of land tenure systems. The lecture also covers different types of land occupancy, such as customary, state, and informal, highlighting the issues of conflicting land rights and the obstacles to public interest projects. It concludes by addressing the difficulties arising from overlapping land rights, leading to conflicts, insecurity, and speculation, which hinder urban development initiatives.

Official source

Related concepts (13)

Land tenure

In common law systems, land tenure, from the French verb "tenir" means "to hold", is the legal regime in which land owned by an individual is possessed by someone else who is said to "hold" the land, based on an agreement between both individuals. It determines who can use land, for how long and under what conditions. Tenure may be based both on official laws and policies, and on informal local customs (insofar higher law does allow that).

Land reform

Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy or noble owners with extensive land holdings (e.g., plantations, large ranches, or agribusiness plots) to individual ownership by those who work the land.

Feudal land tenure in England

Under the English feudal system several different forms of land tenure existed, each effectively a contract with differing rights and duties attached thereto. Such tenures could be either free-hold, signifying that they were hereditable or perpetual, or non-free where the tenancy terminated on the tenant's death or at an earlier specified period. In England's ancient past large parts of the realm were unoccupied and owned as allodial titles: the landowners simply cooperated with the king out of a mutual interest instead of legal obligation.

Urban planning

Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications, and distribution networks and their accessibility.

Urbanization

Urbanization (or urbanisation) is the population shift from rural to urban areas, the corresponding decrease in the proportion of people living in rural areas, and the ways in which societies adapt to this change. It can also mean population growth in urban areas instead of rural ones. It is predominantly the process by which towns and cities are formed and become larger as more people begin living and working in central areas. Urbanization is often responsible for the myriad of modern problems facing humanity.

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