Michael Mattingly

Continuing to manage natural resources helps peri-urban people to shift from rural to city-based livelihoods. Natural resource management can continue to be important to rural people while an expanding city or town engulfs them. Michael Mattingly and Pam Gregory present this message in the October 2009 issue of Local Environment (Vol. 4, No. 9). The article arose out of Gregory's analysis and synthesis of 10 years of research on peri-urban livelihoods that was financed by the Natural Resources Systems Programme of the UK's Department for International Development and monitored by Michael Mattingly on behalf of the DPU.

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.

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.

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.

• urban land management – including planning – that goes beyond those traditional/conventional practices that have been so ineffective in serving social and economic development;

m.mattingly@dpu-associates.net