Community Land Access & Security

Nigerian politicians like to talk about creating ‘megacities,’ but it’s hard for people living in the country’s slums to see their place in this vision of the future. Voiceless in the policy debate, their homes get bulldozed in the name of urban regeneration. Making them owners instead of subjects of research on urban land rights could give them the direct line to policymakers they so desperately need.

GLA’s Malcolm Childress and Selina Carter and Fundação Getulio Vargas’s Edgard Barki were published in the academic journal Land for their article “Fit-for-Purpose, Private-Sector Led Land Regularization and Financing of Informal Settlements in Brazil”.

Global Land Alliance partners at the Urban Planning Department of the University of Lagos recently published a booklet entitled “Lagos Urban Planning: Debunking Myths & Stereotypes”, organized and compiled by Rethinking Cities Initiative and the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. Global Land Alliance congratulates and highlights this accomplishment to better understand key issues to tenure and property rights in Lagos.

As we share the Global Land Alliance's 2019 Annual Report with you, we reflect on the core issues of security for land, shelter, and livelihoods that has been further underscored by the global COVID19 pandemic. These issues that GLA has been working towards since our founding six years ago. GLA continues to grow to advance sustainable prosperity for people and places in innovative and exciting ways, and continues to deliver this mission through a Reliance on our Alliance. GLA's alliance consists of individuals and organizations that share a common vision and mission.

The current pandemic brings concepts of property to the foreground.  Stay at home orders, social distancing, commercial closures, draconian border control, the interruption of air travel (to use just a few examples) are about how space is to be used, about new mandates for (most commonly) restrictions to commons, public, and private property, and often very intense social controversy over who gets to set the rules for property use.  How property is understood and treated in the planning process will now be one of our key issues going forward.  In Pandemics, Property, and Planning  a global group of scholars reflect on the pandemic’s meaning and implications through the lens of land-based property rights and spatial planning. 

GLA’s Malcolm Childress was interviewed by Catherine Cheney for DEVEX on the launch of a spinoff of Omidyar Network called PlaceFund, spun out of the property rights initiative at Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm launched by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

Curitiba, Brazil – Terra Nova, an organization that documents land ownership in order to improve quality of life in Brazilian settlements, and Global Land Alliance announced today a partnership to scale a proven model for mediating between land owners and favela occupants in Brazil and to develop a historical database for research purposes

Last month, 35 community leaders from 10 countries across the Global South gathered in Puerto Rico to learn about Community Land Trusts (CLTs)

The CLT Center joins community leaders from across the US and world as participants in Intersections 2018, hosted by Grounded Solutions Network happening October 1-4th. Excited to build partnerships and knowledge sharing in lasting affordability, community land trust, diversity, equity, inclusion and sustainability.