Institutional pluralism and pro-poor land registration: lessons on interim property rights from urban Tanzania

While interim property rights are thought to achieve incremental improvements of tenure security and rights for the urban poor, there is surprisingly little research into the provision of starter documents in sub-Saharan Africa. Namely, how effective are interim property rights in responding to local demands for tenure security and rights in the long run and vis-à-vis other de facto and de jure tenure options? Drawing on an institutional analytic approach and mixed-method research, we study the Residential Licence programme of Tanzania, which offers short-term leases to around 220,000 plots in Dar es Salaam. This interim property right has undergone substantial institutional drift, with decreasing uptake rates, low renewal rates and poor updating of records. Today, landholders value other de facto and de jure proofs of ownership over and above the Residential Licence, which is now less perceived as pro-poor and fit-for-purpose. These results illustrate that interim property rights need maintenance and recalibration, or they will ‘come adrift’ amidst other institutional layers. Reflecting on the effects of institutional layering in property rights, this paper contributes to literatures on incremental land reform and demand for land titles, and it provides important policy recommendations relevant to urban Tanzania and wider contexts

Emerging Economic Geographies of Higher Education: A complex negotiation of value (and values) in the face of market hegemony.

PhDTaking higher education (HE) in England as its case study, this PhD adapts and reposes Roger Lee’s thesis on the Ordinary Economy to help understand how neoliberal market values become negotiated, embedded and transformed in and through complex emerging economic geographies. In 2011, pursuing a somewhat neoliberal theme, the HE White Paper sought to further organize the sector through the application of certain market values and metrics, whereby a demand-led system would increase efficiency and competitiveness by making universities more directly accountable to their studentconsumers than ever before. Since the late 1970s, ascendant forms of neoliberalism have come under scrutiny with some political economy and governmentality scholars underscoring neoliberalization’s processual and variegated nature wherein geographies and extant political economic relations matter to its concrete manifestation. However, some studies have encountered difficulties in accounting for how top-down political programmes become “anchored into” the complexity of everyday life, and/or in presupposing that their desired “subject-effects” will be either automatically realized or successfully resisted (Barnett, 2005). Thus, by residualising “the social”, theories of hegemony and governmentality often fail to illuminate the complex interplay between abstract policy programmes and the complexity of the Ordinary Economy. To overcome such weaknesses, this PhD follows Lee’s assertion that economic geographies are always emerging and inherently relational entities in and through which value emerges from the practice and performance of socio-economic life. Thus, studying the economy means grappling with the multiple values, social relations and notions of value that constitute economic geographies. Adapting a framework to examine four universities in England, the PhD illuminates the transformative power of both political programmes and socio-economic relations as, in this case, market hegemony was (re)-produced in multiple and complex forms. Neoliberalization is thus shown to be a bottom-up as well as top-down process that is constructed in practice. For it is the practice of socio-spatial economic relations that determines what is and is not value.ESRC 1+3 scholarshi

Local residents are losing out from climate change adaption measures in Tanzania

Low compensation, poor process, and a lack of transparency are leaving people in Dar es Salaam worse off as the government tries to implement flood mitigation measures along the Msimbazi river basin, write Maddy Diment, Erica Pani, Mwajuma Mshana and Martina Manara

Transforming the riverside: a self-guided walk along the south bank of the Thames in London

Explore one of the most vibrant areas of central London Discover how derelict industrial sites became a cultural quarter Uncover the historical and political stories behind regeneratio

Economic geographies of value revisited

As the debate continues in economic geography regarding the theoretical, methodological, and empirical need to abstract out from the complexity of real‐world economic activity versus the need to examine the multiplicity and specificity of actually existing economies, this article revisits an object the ontology of which sits at the heart of such debates, that is, value. For a sub‐discipline that has long‐battled to be taken seriously as a social “science,” the subject of value in economic geographies has become a battle royal between those who are willing to essentialise and those who are not, with many scholars justify their opposing positions on the grounds of theoretical salience and/or methodological rigour. In this article, I position value as the exemplar of these arguments, contrasting Roger Lee's (2006, 2011) relational understanding of value to the essentialising tendencies of Marx and neoclassicism. The paper posits that far from the openness of a relational approach being theoretically “weak,” its strength in being able to deal with real‐world complexity allows economic geographers to better explore some of societies' most important questions

Remaking London: decline and regeneration in urban culture by Ben Campkin

In Remaking London, Ben Campkin provides an engaging and powerful account of the contradictions of urban regeneration, a ‘slippery’ process that too often removes ‘precisely the qualities and activities it claims to engender

Planning, value(s) and the market: an analytic for “what comes next?”

For 30 years, planning has been attacked both rhetorically and materially in England as governments have sought to promote economic deregulation over landuse planning. Our paper examines two new moments of planning deregulation. These are the loosening of regulation around short-term letting in London and the new permitted development rights, which allow for office to residential conversion without the need for planning permission. Whilst these may be viewed as rather innocuous reforms on the surface, they directly and profoundly illustrate how planners are often trapped between their legal duty to promote public values as dictated by national planning policy and the government’s desire to deregulate. We argue that viewing these changes through a value-based approach to economy and regulation illuminates how multiple and complex local values and understandings of value shape planners’ strategies and actions and thus vary national policies in practice. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how planners have, at least, the opportunity to develop a critical voice and to advocate for policy interpretations that can help to create better outcomes for local communities