‘Somewhere to Live: Rising to the global urban land and housing challenge’

Why is it that despite decades of economic growth, it is becoming harder to find somewhere to live that is decent and affordable? ‘Somewhere to Live: Rising to the global urban land and housing challenge’ explains the causes of the problem – and what needs to be done to resolve it. It is written in a […]

Land Matrix Examples

Geoff is delighted to share the land tenure and property right matrices from the students of the Mundus Urbanos master degree course at the Technical University of Darmstadt 2021. Please see the matrices are from: Sydney / Australia Guangzhou / China Kansas (Missouri) / USA Indonesia Pune / India Marseille / France Aleppo / Syria […]

Undertaking a regulatory audit for improving access to legal shelter for the urban poor

What is a regulatory audit? A regulatory audit is a comprehensive review of regulations, standards and administrative procedures relating to urban land development. It provides a record of all the laws, byelaws, decrees and other official norms that seek to determine what developers, land-owners, communities and residents are entitled to do with and on urban […]

Assessing housing needs

Assessing housing needs[1] A primary consideration in evaluating the impact of regulatory frameworks on land and housing is to assess existing and future housing needs. This will enable projections to be made of the area of land required according to the existing regulatory framework. It will also indicate where changes to planning standards or regulations […]

Urban land tenure and property rights

The extent to which people feel secure in their housing is major determinant of the degree to which they will invest in maintaining and improving it. It is therefore vital to understand the level of tenure security that people perceive they possess and the property rights regarding land and housing that apply to different tenure […]

Geoff in UN-Habitat Global Urban Lecture series

The United Nations has just released Geoff’s lecture on land tenure and property rights as part of the UN-Habitat Global Urban Lecture series. You can see it on their website. The lecture distills 30 years of international experience on land tenure issues to provide a short, non-technical review of concepts, issues, methods and policy examples. Geoff hopes the lecture will be […]

GPA20plus20

Late last year, we celebrated twenty years since Geoffrey Payne and Associates was established. I wrote a short paper to reflect on these two decades and outline the actions I think are needed to improve access to land and housing in the future. I invited friends to contribute their own thoughts and ideas and I […]

UK DFID report – August 2015

In early 2015, Geoff was commissioned by DAI Consultants to produce a report for the UK DFID on ‘Legitimate land tenure and property rights: Fostering compliance and development outcomes’. The report went through several iterations involving several colleagues in DAI and was finally published by DFID in August 2015. The report is intended to inform […]