Communal Land Tenure: Learning from African Cities?
(2017) Second International Conference on African Urban Planning — Location: Lisbonne, Portugal (7.September.2017)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- An increasing interest among academics and practitioners has been recently witnessed regarding (urban) commons (Ostrom, Burger et al. 1999, Dardot and Laval 2014). Since free land markets and land titles have tended to prevent many inhabitants to access affordable and adequate housing, alternative forms of urban land tenure have been promoted at the international level (Rolnik 2013). Among these alternative forms, one can find communal and customary land tenure. This paper stems from the idea that much can be learned from urban planning processes happening in the Global South, following Watson (2009). In a first part, I will present the theoretical debate regarding adequate housing and land issues. In a second part, I will expose three cases of communal and customary land tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa, namely: neo-customary access to land in West Africa, Flexible Land Tenure System in Namibia, and Community Land Trust in Kenya. In a third part, I will analyze to what extent these experiments could help reconsidering land management in urban planning theory and practice, regarding key issues of inclusion, justice, and security. This paper has two objectives. First, it is a theoretical contribution to postcolonial urban studies: through the case study of communal land tenure, it seeks to demonstrate to what extent urban planning processes in the Global South could be useful to urban planning theory in general – including in the North. Second, it aims at studying original yet under researched forms of land tenure. It is based on a postdoctoral research project that explores theoretical and practical contributions of urban research in the Global South to urban planning theory and practice. It uses data from (i) fieldwork in Benin, West Africa (2011-2013) conducted for my PhD (Simonneau 2015), (ii) interviews with key stakeholders from the cases mentioned above (2016) and (iii) academic literature and project documentation (from donors, NGOS, etc.).
- Affiliations
Citations
Simonneau, C. (2017). Communal Land Tenure: Learning from African Cities? Second International Conference on African Urban Planning, Lisbonne, Portugal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/175586