The Republic of Indonesia is an equatorial archipelago of over 17,500 islands (6,000 inhabited) extending about 3,200 miles or 5,150 kilometers East to West and 1,250 miles or 2,012 kilometres North to South.
It is the largest archipelago in the world with 1,919,443 square kilometers or 741,098 square miles divided into 33 provinces.Indonesia is also the fourth largest (and the largest muslim) population in the world with 218,868,791 people (2005 census).
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is the world’s 7th most populous and second largest Muslim nation, after Indonesia, with a population of about 160 million. Current trends in urban development remain uncontrolled and unguided and are highly unsustainable.
Despite a well developed legal framework, a number of local good practices and significant national expertise, fragmentation and overlapping of responsibilities at all levels makes addressing these issues complex. Very little is achieved in implementing the existing set of policies covering human settlements and housing.
This situation has resulted in exacerbating urban poverty amidst a rapidly growing urban economy. The social unrest and instability in the cities is attributed to this gap between the rich and the poor in the urban areas.
This book is a cross-cultural endeavour to promote global strategies for enhancing security of tenure in the Muslim world. It addresses the gap in both the human rights and Islamic literature on land and property issues.