In International Development Planning Review (vol 31, no 1), Michael Mattingly has speculated on how land policy might reduce the negative impacts of cities on the livelihoods of peri-urban farmers who tend to be poor and especially vulnerable to change. Using the findings of 10 years of research on peri-urban livelihoods in developing countries, financed by the Natural Resources Systems Programme of the UK Government Department for International Development which he advised, he assembled evidence of how land can figure in the changes to rural livelihoods.

In November 2008, Anna Soave and Mona Khechen (DPU 2000) completed a 6-months assignment for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Historic Cities Programme (AKTC/HCP), funded by the Italian Trust Fund for Culture and Sustainable Development (ITFCSD), to assist the World Bank in its urban heritage-related activities in Afghanistan.

Desmond McNeill has recently published a new book, co-authored with Asun Lera St Clair, critically assessing what multilateral organisations say and do in the realm of ethics and human rights. (Global Poverty, Ethics and Human Rights: the role of multilateral organisations, 2009).

In February 2009, Patrick Wakely, Babar Mumtaz, and Sheilah Meikle conducted a series of workshops on the decentralisation of the planning, management and upgrading of informal settlements for some 40 professionals and technicians from four of the five Governorates of Greater Cairo. They also ran a parallel course of seminars for the staff of the GTZ (German Technical Cooperation) Participatory Development Programme in Urban Areas (PDP) in Egypt. Both events raised interesting issues concerning the implementation of national decentralisation policies and strategies for participation.

Seconded in 2003 by the DPU to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture / Historic Cities Programme (AKTC/HCP), Anna Soave has been working in Kabul for 5 years as an urban planner engaged in hands-on planning in the low-income and war-affected areas of the Old City, in support of AKTC’s on-going rehabilitation programme in Afghanistan.

Michael Mattingly, Hamid Majedi (DPU PhD 1996) and Ramin Keivani (DPU PhD 1993) have recently published an account in Urban Studies of Iran's little-known experience in improving access to land for housing through large scale public land banking. Using the research of Hamid Majedi, the article examines the first 10 years of the implementation of a policy that adds to the debate surrounding the widely accepted notion of market-enabling in order to improve low-income housing provision in developing countries. This action of the Government of Iran effectively provided an alternative to land markets that have hitherto failed to serve low-income and even lower middle income households.

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.

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.