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.

This report examines municipal law making surrounding land use planning in the City of Cape Town. It investigates the extent to which the City of Cape Town has powers to make by-laws on land use planning and how much of that power is circumscribed by other state organs and levels. It also examines the institutional and practical context in which municipal law making takes place in order to assess the actual relevance of the city’s power to make law.

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.

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.

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 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.