In large Latin American cities the number of dwellings in informal settlements ranges from one-tenth to one-third of urban residences. These informal settlements are caused by low income, unrealistic urban planning, lack of serviced land, lack of social housing, and a dysfunctional legal system. The settlements develop over time and some have existed for decades, often becoming part of the regular development of the city, and therefore gaining rights, although usually lacking formal titles. Whether they are established on public or private land, they develop irregularly and often do not have critical public services such as sanitation, resulting in health and environmental hazards. In this report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, author Edesio Fernandes, a lawyer and urban planner from Latin America, studies the options for regularization of the informal settlements. Regularization is looked at through established programs in both Peru and Brazil, in an attempt to bring these settlements much needed balance and improvement. In Peru, based on Hernando de Soto's theory that tenure security triggers development and increases property value, from 1996 to 2006, 1.5 million freehold titles were issued at a cost of $64 per household. This did result in an increase of property values by about 25 percent, making the program cost effective. Brazil took a much broader and more costly approach to regularization by not only titling the land, but improving public services, job creation, and community support structures. This program in Brazil has had a cost of between $3,500 to $5,000 per household and has affected a much lower percent of the population. The report offers recommendations for improving regularization policy and identifies issues that must be addressed, such as collecting data with baseline figures to get a true evaluation of the benefit of programs established. Also, it shows that each individual informal settlement must have a customized plan, as a single approach will not work for each settlement. There is a need to include both genders for long-term effectiveness and to find ways to make the regularization self-sustaining financially. Any program must be closely monitored to insure the conditions are improved for the marginalized, as well as be sure it is not causing new informal settlements to be established.

After the 1960s, rapid urbanization in developing regions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia was marked by the expansion of low-income "irregular" settlements that developed informally and which, by the 2000s, often constituted between 20-60 percent of the built-up area of metropolitan areas and other large cities. There has been a variety of research directed at the housing policies involved with these informal settlements, yet apart from the activities of Latin American Housing Network (LAHN), there has been minimal attention directed at the earliest portion of settlements that formed some 25-40 years ago that now form a large part of the intermediate ring of the cities. This volume breaks new ground by opening up a new generation of housing policy in Latin America cities with broader application for other developing countries. Its editors bring unique perspectives: Peter Ward coordinates the LAHN, and Edith Jiménez and María Di Virgilio are founding members of the network who have led project teams in Guadalajara and Buenos Aires respectively. Developed as a coordinated collaborative research project, the volume encompasses nine Latin American countries and eleven cities. The editors and contributors offer original perspectives on the policy challenges facing much of the low income housing of Latin American cities; document the changing nature of the "first suburbs"; present comparative survey findings in order to better understand the types of consolidated settlements that exist today; describe the physical nature of the dwellings themselves; identify the reasons behind market dysfunction that impede the operation of consolidated housing informal markets in Latin American cities; and outline a new generation of housing policies that will support the processes of densification, rehabilitation, and regeneration of these settlements. This book is the first and only composite overview of the research findings and advocacy of the generic policy lines that the LAHN identifies as central to a new generation of housing strategies and approaches. Researchers and practitioners working on housing theory, housing policy, comparative spatial and sociological research, and urban development issues will find the book highly significant.

A renowned economist argues for the importance of property rights in "the most intelligent book yet written about the current challenge of establishing capitalism in the developing world" (Economist) "The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we've forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.

Latin American cities have always been characterized by a strong tension between what is vaguely described as their formal and informal dimensions. However, despite intrinsic semantic implications, the terms formal and informal do not refer only to the physical aspect of cities but also to their entire socio-political fabric. Given the fact that informal cities and settlements exceed the structures of order, control and homogeneity expected to be found in the formal city, the wide-ranging essays in this volume from disciplinary areas such as anthropology, architecture, history, cultural and urban studies, and sociology are concerned with the need to produce alternative methods of analysis in order to study the phenomenon of urban informality. This book provides a thoroughgoing review of the work that is currently being carried out by scholars, practitioners and governmental institutions, in and outside Latin America, on the question of informal cities.

For several decades, the phenomenon of irregularity in urban land tenure has been central element in the growth of Latin American cities. In the case of Tijuana, informal settlements have proliferated through the city’s history as a result of spectacular population growth, a significant share of the population’s lack of economic capacity to acquire housing, a limited supply of land in the real estate market for housing construction, local topographical obstacles, and institutional weaknesses in all three levels of government that prevent the orderly oversight of property rights and urban development. According to the findings of this study, more than half of currently occupied dwelling units in the Tijuana had irregular origins. In the context, the book embodies a systematic approach to the study of land tenure informality in the city. The research findings address the location and dimensions of informal settlements; their implications for housing quality and availability of basic public services and urban infrastructure, as well as implications for local real estate markets; and the limitations of the public institutions charged with housing production and supervision and with the process of land tenure regularization. The research presented here retains its currency and topicality ten years after it was carried out. This English edition is an effort to contribute to debate and analysis about one of the central issues in economic and social progress in every large city in the developing world.