Michael MATTINGLY

Michael Mattingly gave 29 years to consultancy, research and post-graduate teaching at the Development Planning Unit, after 14 years of international experience as an urban planner in government and consultant organisations. He has worked in over 20 countries of Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe. His interests now focus on:

• urban land management – including planning – that goes beyond those traditional/conventional practices that have been so ineffective in serving social and economic development;
• practices of peri-urban land management and of peri-urban livelihoods improvement;
• building capacities through training to perform the above.

Recent work in urban land management has included the preparation of a "quick guide" for ESCAP for use in small countries of Southeast Asia on the delivery of urban land for housing poor people, research on neo-customary land management in 9 Sub-Saharan African countries, jointly funded by PRUD and DFID (with Alain Durand-Lasserve), and research into rapid spatial planning practices to support urban infrastructure investment taking place in Indonesia, Nepal, and India, funded by DFID,

Peri-urban interface work has included synthesising a decade of research in Africa and India on livelihoods, poverty, and NR-based production at the peri-urban interface funded by the Natural Resources Systems Programme (DFID), advising for seven years the Natural Resources Systems Programme of research of DFID on its peri-urban interface component in India and Ghana, and developing guidelines for strategic environmental planning and management of the peri-urban interface which will benefit the poor, funded by DFID.

Training and teaching regarding these matters has included directing for many years the MSc course in urban development planning for the Development Planning Unit, delivering the MSc degree components on urban planning, on urban management, and on land for housing, lecturing in China, Argentina, and Chile on urban planning, delivering in Nigeria and Zimbabwe (for DFID) and Nepal (for GTZ), as well as in London, short training courses in urban land planning and management, and reviewing local government capacity building programmes in Jordan (for GTZ) and in Namibia (for IBIS-DANIDA).

Before joining the Development Planning Unit, he practiced urban planning for the governments of Uganda, Kenya, a London borough, a UK county, and an American city, and he worked as a planner for two private consulting firms.

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