Michael Mattingly hopes to generate a debate by arguing in the latest issue of Public Administration and Development that, if a development project is destined to reach only a selection of its intended beneficiaries or to give them only momentary or uncertain benefits, there is a strong rationale for making it recasting it as a research project from which lessons can be learnt from the impact that it may not otherwise have.

Diana Mitlin, who works at IIED, has been collaborating with Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) to understand the contribution of Urban Poor Funds to SDI’s own work and the wider issue of financing shelter improvements.

Over the last year Babar Mumtaz has been the Team Leader and Institutional Development Specialist of the proposed ADB (Asian Development Bank) Sindh Secondary Cities Improvement Project, which has raised several interesting and complicated political issues, which he discusses here.

Since February 2006, Katja Schäfer has been working with UN-HABITAT’s Somali Urban Development Programme [SUDP]¹ as an Urban Planner in the Somaliland and Puntland regions, giving technical and planning support to a number of Local Authorities through on-the-job training on small strategic projects as a catalyst for wider urban development.

Michael Mattingly and Ramin Keivani (DPU PhD 1993) have published an important paper - The Interface of Globalization and Peripheral Land in the Cities of the South: Implications for Urban Governance and Local Economic Development - in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (Vol.31.2, June 2007) calling for more research of the impact of globalisation on land peripheral to large cities of the south.

Over the last ten years Keith Sargent has been increasingly involved in the post-conflict reconstruction of fragile states. This has led him to undertake research at the Desmond Tutu Centre for War and Peace Studies. Here he describes some of the issues that he has been confronting.

Two major studies led by Jo Beall for the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU)¹ were among the first to highlight the unprecedented and largely unplanned urbanisation that now characterises the country, as well as the realities of urban poverty and vulnerability for growing numbers of Afghans. Together the reports draw on two years of research conducted in Kabul, Heart, Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Pul-i-Khumri, with the second study tracking the life paths of poor urban households over an entire year.

In late May 2006, Keith Sargent was commissioned by the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) to advise on the economic management training requirements for government officials and academia in North Korea. This brief note highlights the achievements, frustrations and ultimate demise of an initiative that aimed to address a few of the real development needs of North Korea and transcend the rhetoric of the Six Party Talks.

In April-May 2007, Adrian Atkinson was commissioned directly by the Ministry of Construction to work with the Southern Sub-Institute for Urban and Rural Planning on a kind of mid-term evaluation of the draft plan for Ho Chi Minh City and six surrounding provinces and to recommend adjustments in methodology or content that I felt could improve the plan. The input was two months long.