Urban Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement by Vincent Roquet, Luciano Bornholdt

The rapid expansion and development of urban areas to meet the needs of growing populations requires programs to improve transportation, watershed management, water supply and sanitation, and solid waste management. These programs, when successfully implemented, can substantially improve the lives of the people in these areas and constitute a development opportunity for all. 

The urban transition, however, brings complex challenges—in the form of land acquisition and the resettlement of the people who own or occupy the land under development. Planners, policy makers, and social scientists need to design and implement urban development programs in ways that include the people who lose their land, houses, or livelihoods as equal partners in the development process. 
Urban Land Acquisition and Involuntary Resettlement: Linking Innovation and Local Benefits analyzes the lessons learned from five successful case studies in the following five countries: Brazil, India, Mauritania, Morocco, and Pakistan.

• In Brazil, resettlement practices with demonstrated and strongly positive outcomes and contributions to urban development influenced governments to incorporate them into their own laws and regulations, potentially benefiting millions of affected people.
• In India, the private sector played a key role in unleashing the potential created by high-value land to provide sustainable housing solutions to those adversely affected—at no cost to the government or the resettlers.
• In Mauritania, collective approaches with strong community participation helped to address difficult challenges related to housing.
• In Morocco and Pakistan, well-designed and implemented, citizen-driven resettlement programs resulted in enhanced skills and livelihoods and promoted overall sustainable urban development.

The factors of success identified in each of these cases include transparency, participation of people affected, understanding of informal economic and social networks, adaptive management of resettlement operations, postresettlement socioeconomic surveys and independent monitoring and evaluation, local capacity-building and dissemination of good urban resettlement practices, integration of resettlement into a wider municipal planning and housing policy content, and strengthening of country systems.