Scaling Up Inclusive and Affordable Housing in the New Urban Agenda: Land Use Regulation Challenges for Socially inclusive and Sustainable Cities

This training event provides opportunities for urban practitioners, housing specialists, NGO and Academics to develop skills and knowledge about the formulation and implementation of inclusive affordable housing policies drawn on land management instruments that enables cities to supply land for planned and sustainable urbanization. The event will make use of advanced techniques and methodologies used by both organizations in training events that are jointly organized in several cities of Latin America annually. The importance of land use regulation and its centrality to bringing housing supply to scale is often underestimated. Yet, there are limits to inclusive, affordable and sustainable housing development on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda and the SDG 11.1, that can be prolonged by poor governance of land use. 

Why is land use regulation relevant for the implementation NUA? The unequal distribution of welfare that is found in the growing metropolitan areas of developing countries has been widely documented. Rapid urbanization is often accompanied by short-term uncoordinated sprawling land development, leading to inefficient and inequitable socio-economic outcomes let alone the spatial distribution of publically provided urban infrastructure and services. For example, in the less developed countries, cities expanded in area by a factor of 3.5 between 1990 and 2015 while 60% of overall housing in the areas of cities built were unplanned or informally developed, outside the reach of formal regulations (Atlas of Urban Expansion, 2016).  While the area of cities is growing very rapidly, household location within the urban fabric generates an inequality trap: segregated by income –some groups are located in neighborhoods with limited access to public services and opportunities, remaining low in productivity and hence poor. In metropolitan areas of many developing countries, urban growth is leading to cities within cities: closed communities and distant suburban social housing projects, versus ghettos and subserviced slums in the metropolitan peripheries at the same time that still abandoned or vacant urban cores provide space for denser slums, willing to reap some of the benefits of agglomeration. This has been so, from the social housing projects in cities peripheries, to the informal and marginalized squatter settlements, which all appear as obstacles to reconciling the consequences of accelerated urbanization and (dysfunctional) urban expansion in terms of providing the improving access to urban opportunities that will favor urban inclusion. 

These facts are not trivial for the implementation of the NUA: Land use regulation is of central importance in determining inclusive affordable housing at scale and the universality of access to some inputs that are key to foster inclusion, broaden productivity and reduce inequalities.  Thus, the inequality problem related to urban growth, housing location and infrastructure access - makes it meaningful to improve planners and policy makers’ skills in a session covering issues of land use regulation effects and the new governance challenges related to planning for land use in urban and metropolitan areas.
No pre-registration required