Environmental reviews, often in the form of environmental impact or strategic environmental assessments, play a fundamental role in the process of urban development. They are institutionalized decision-making arrangements in domestic legislation to address the environmental impacts and risks associated with a project. Strengthened environmental and social reviews in urban development processes and their integration into broader decision making frameworks will support the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and several of the Sustainable Development Goals by approving projects which are ecologically sensitive, socially-acceptable, and economically cost-effective. Six case studies in this book, from Uganda, South Africa, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and the USA, present empirical evidence on the relationship between environmental and development decision-making in the urban context. The cases identify key implementation issues and options to address them efficiently at country and city levels. Building upon this, the work also outlines capacity building needs and coordination approaches that are appropriate to resource poor contexts.

This report analyzes the potential and challenges of land readjustment in Turkey, looking at the specific difficulties related to the implementation of projects and providing recommendations to improve implementation and outcomes. The methodology is based on a desktop study, in-depth interviews with selected experts and case studies on different uses of land readjustment. The desk study includes the findings of previous studies related to land readjustment; in particular, two surveys related to the use of land readjustment by Turk in 2003 and 2008. Turk’s questionnaire in 2003 surveyed 468 municipalities and 300 technical experts (surveying engineers and urban planners). The 2008 study surveyed 60 large municipalities.

UN-Habitat has initiated a process of strengthening its urban legal knowledge and recently identified seven new focus areas, one of which is “urban legislation, land and governance”. The agency sees an important opportunity to influence member states’ and Habitat Agenda Partners’ initiatives on developing new and transforming old urban legislation. UN-Habitat has chosen to focus on a particular set of legal tools used to facilitate large-scale urban expansion, known as land readjustment / land pooling.

This report is the result of an analysis of two land readjustment projects that were implemented in Huambo, central Angola, between 2006 and 2008.

Land readjustment is the concept of assembling land with the general objective of facilitating the development or redevelopment of land. It has been used, for example, to redraw boundaries of rural land to make farms more efficient, to pool developed properties in brownfield redevelopment schemes, to assemble land for new developments in “greenfield” sites, and to achieve densification in already developed urban areas.

Global Experiences in Land Readjustment is a valuable source of information and ideas on the implementation of land readjustment. It offers experiences from developing countries and countries with economies in transition and its primary purpose is to demonstrate that land readjustment is a practical and useful tool for addressing a variety of spatial and development challenges in a range of contexts. The case studies presented include experiences from Angola, Bhutan, Chile, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Russia, Thailand and Turkey.

This book will help countries, especially those in the Global South, to identify and explore choices, and their likely impacts, and, as a result, improve the quality and durability of project outcomes. It may also be useful in implementing urbanisation policy, as it provides examples of the resources and institutional capacities required to deliver different types of project.

The book does not aim at giving the perfect formula for a successful land readjustment or even that land readjustment is a magic bullet for the challenges of urbanisation. Nonetheless, it does establish land readjustment as one of the most flexible tools available to all countries to bring citizens, planners and governments at all levels together with the aim of making ordered urbanisation at scale possible.

The Colombian legal-urban framework is a robust and complex structure of tools that seek to meet land’s “social and ecological function”, defined by Colombia’s 1991 Constitution. It has become a renowned example in Latin America, as it introduces many different principles and tools that other countries in the region had not implemented or utilized.

The strengthening of urban development and territorial planning as key elements in the overall development of Colombia has led to the creation of strong and renovated institutions, which seek to manage, coordinate, and control the new principles and tools for territorial development.

The last several decades have seen a change in the legal landscape relating to land in Puntland and Somaliland. Traditionally, both regions have consisted primarily of large swaths of rural and agricultural land, owned in common by clans and subclans in accordance with customary law. While the customary system is also capable of recognizing individual rights and grievances of members of the community in question, it remains primarily accessible to male members of the majority clan.

Though women from both minority and majority clans report that the customary system is often inaccessible to or biased against them, the community at large perceives it as more trustworthy and less prone to undue influence than the courts.

Decisions made through the customary system also tend to be fast and efficient. This report discusses the Land Dispute Tribunals in Somaliland and the Land Dispute Resolution Committees in Puntland. The LDTs are intended to be hybrid institutions capable of harnessing benefits from both the formal and the customary system.