Pirates and invaders: Land acquisition in urban Colombia and Venezuela

Illegality of private subdivision and access to land for housing by the urban poor in Dhaka

“…Therefore, the utopia of modern rectilinear and axial urban form, land use regulations and service provisions are not valid reasons to restrict developers. Contrary to the suggestions of Gilbert (1981), subdivision developers are not risk-taking entrepreneurs. Except a few large and well-known companies for whom government restriction in not the primary constraint, developers only invest when there is a confirmation of a certain number of buyers.…”

“…Such insecurity of tenure is an outcome of the perpetual illegality and extra-legal market process of the less powerful developers. The term 'subdivision' often refers to a well-organised land acquisition and distribution process (see Gilbert, 1981). Subdivision in the city periphery is one mode, often the easiest mode to avoid cumbersome legal procedures, but certainly not the only mode of land supply.…”

“…The peripheral residential subdivisions have been a major source of land supply in most cities of developing countries (Baross & Van der Linden, 1990;Fekade, 2000). It is often argued that the emergence of informal sub-market is the result of planning regulations inherited from the colonial administration that practice unduly high standards in view of the financial capacity of low-income households (Gilbert, 1981;Mehta, Mitra, & Nientied, 1989;Sivam, 2002: 528).…”

Inward Industrialization and Orderly Urbanization in South Africa: Lessons From Colombia

“…In contrast to the situation in many other cities of Latin America where organized land invasions constitute the prime means by which the poor obtain land, in Bogota it is calculated that less than one per cent of the city's housing occurred in invasion areas (Gilbert, 1981(Gilbert, , 1983aGilbert and Ward, 1985).…”

The rise (and fall?) of a state land bank

“…Unlike many other cities in Latin America, illegal development rarely took the form of land invasions. Rather, 'pirate' developers sub-divided land at the edge of the city, sold it without planning permission and offered settlers a minimal supply of infrastructure (Carroll, 1980;Gilbert, 1981;Losada & Gó mez, 1976). Households designed and built homes as quickly as their resources would permit.…”