The South Africa-based non-governmental organisation Urban LandMark will run a conference from 1 to 2 November 2010, with the theme ‘Rethinking emerging land markets in rapidly growing Southern African cities’.
Urban LandMark invites abstracts for papers on the abovementioned subject, and/or organisational participation in the initiative. By bringing together key commentators on urban land issues in Southern Africa (and beyond), the organisation aims to ascertain the state of knowledge on access to land and land markets by poor people, and build stronger links amongst practitioners and researchers. The closing date for submission of abstracts is Friday 6 August 2010. The conference themes have been devised as follows:
Theme 1: ‘Recognising land rights - identifying alternative ways of recognising land rights’. Located within the broad idea of the “right to the city”, this theme explores alternative ways of recognising land rights, and integrating these into existing legal systems.
Theme 2: ‘The political economy of urban land markets in Africa’. This session invites papers that explore the dynamics of power and the urban land market. How do existing property markets work in growing African cities? Who are the market players and how do they shape the power dynamics of the market?
Theme 3: ‘Urban land governance’. We are particularly looking for papers that present innovative regulatory approaches to land, state-land release programmes for settlement by the poor, their challenges, opportunities and best practice approaches.
Although this conference focuses on Southern Africa, the organisers encourage the submission of papers from other regions that are comparable and promote learning between countries and regions from the African continent.
Please send abstracts to Caroline Kihato and Mark Napier. Please include your full contact details, and the thematic area/s that your proposed paper addresses. Abstracts will be reviewed by a panel which will report back to authors by mid-August. Final papers of not more than 5,000 words (not including references) will be due by Friday 1 October 2010.
