Development Workshop’s Director Allan Cain presented a paper on DW’s work at the PILaR Book Project Workshop at Istanbul Technical University which ran from October 22 to 23, 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey. Most urban growth in Angola has been unregulated expansion at the periphery of cities, leading to large and still growing informal settlements around an older urban core. This paper maps out a model of “land readjustment” or “land pooling” that may be appropriate in the context of Angola’s current urban crisis. The paper presents two cases illustrating the introduction of land readjustment, one successful and the other not, with the aim of learning from and adapting the approach in future public land and settlement policies in Angola.

Land readjustment is a participatory land-assembly concept used to redraw boundaries of peri-rural and peri-urban land in order to prepare land for urban development. The process assembles numerous parcels of “raw” land and then, without paying monetary compensation to the owners, subdivides and services the land for urban use. Some of the resulting building sites are then returned to the original owners as compensation in proportion to the value of their land contributions, and the remaining sites are sold to recover public utility costs.

The cases presented here demonstrate how land readjustment was used in a participatory way to assemble land for planning new urban development in Huambo. This paper argues that despite a rather challenging environment, land readjustment in Angola has the potential to become an important tool for urban planning. It shows that, while there is still no legal framework for land readjustment and a very limited culture of participation in urban planning processes, growing land markets and strong private sector partners can make land readjustment a viable option for local governments.

The Huambo land readjustment case studies presented here demonstrate that de facto recognition of the good faith occupation rights of existing land owners-occupiers is fundamental to the functioning of an inclusive land market. The recognition of occupants’ rights allows them to benefit economically, along with all the other actors in the market at the time of legalization and regularization of tenure.

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Istanbul, 1950

DW Director Allan Cain presented on “Participatory & Inclusive Community Land Readjustment in Huambo, Angola” to the UN Habitat Expert Group Meeting on Slum Upgrading Using Participatory and Inclusive Land Readjustment which took place in Nairobi, Kenya from December 3 to 4, 2013.

The increase in the number of slum dwellers and the proliferation of slums are the reflection of failed or inexistent urban policies. This poses serious challenges to governments and their responsibilities in ensuring the right of their citizens to adequate housing. Participatory and Inclusive Land Readjustment (PILaR) is based on the land value capture theoretical rationale and is one of the new initiatives of UN-Habitat highly supported by the Executive Director, Dr. Joan Clos. PILaR aims to promote the supply of serviced urban land through a negotiated process. It is in line with the concet of “planned city extension” that envisages ensuring land supply in a proactive manner, therefore before rapid urbanization turns growing and expanding cities into mega slums. The latter pertains to the prevention dimension of dealing with informal settlements.

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Research Report Presented to World Bank Angola Demobilization and Reintegration Project and Foreign Affairs Canada – Human Security Programme. This research examines the land issue in relation to the return, resettlement and reintegration of ex-combatants in post-war Angola. It focuses on Huambo Province, which has the highest rural population density in Angola, the greatest concentration of the demobilized, and a long tradition in agriculture. Specifically, it seeks to understand the mechanisms used by the demobilized to access land for agriculture and the constraints, problems and conflicts they face in the process.

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Presented to the Conference on Adequate and Affordable Housing for All: Research, Policy, Practice in Toronto. Angola’s last four decades of near-continuous war were years of tremendous human suffering, large-scale displacements of the population, heavy damage to property and infrastructure, serious economic losses and accumulation of a massive war debt. At its peak an estimated four million or more than a quarter of the total population was internally displaced. The war has urbanised Angola’s population, and even today, two years after the war ended, more than 50% of the population live in cities. The urban poor in Angola suffer increasing social exclusion that inhibits their full participation in a post war recovery. They have been denied access to the means to pull themselves out of poverty. Author: Allan Cain.

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