Informal Land Rights and Infrastructure Retrofit: A Typology of Land Rights in Informal Settlements

Mahsa Mesgar,Diego Ramirez-Lovering

doi:10.3390/land10030273

Abstract

Informal settlements represent a challenging operational context for local government service providers due to precarious contextual conditions. Location choice and land procurement for public infrastructure raise the complicated question: who has the right to occupy, control, and use a piece of land in informal settlements? There is currently a dearth of intelligence on how to identify well-located land for public infrastructure, spatially and with careful consideration for safeguarding the claimed rights and preventing conflicts. Drawing on a case study of green infrastructure retrofit in seven informal settlements in Makassar, Indonesia, we classify the informal settlers’ land rights into four types: ownership, use, control, and management. This exploratory study uses a typological approach to investigate the spatial dimension of land rights in informal settlements. We introduce non-registrable land interests and the partial, dynamic, and informal land use rights that impact the land procurement for infrastructure retrofit. We also create a simple spatial matrix describing the control/power, responsibilities and land interests of different stakeholders involved in the location decision making for public infrastructure. We argue that without sufficient understanding of non-formal land rights, land procurement proposals for the public infrastructure upgrades can be frustrated by the individual or group claims on the land, making the service provision impossible in informal settlements.

Highlights

IntroductionInformal housing, which is often part of overcrowded, poorly serviced, and unhealthy neighbourhoods, has proven to be the only affordable housing choice left for a significant part of the population in Global South [1]
Unless we develop a deep understanding of these complex contextual conditions, land procurement proposals for public infrastructure retrofit can be frustrated by individual or group claims on land, making service provision impracticable in informal settlements
This paper aims to introduce a spatial concept for classification of available spaces for green infrastructure intervention in informal settlements

Summary

Introduction

Informal housing, which is often part of overcrowded, poorly serviced, and unhealthy neighbourhoods, has proven to be the only affordable housing choice left for a significant part of the population in Global South [1]. In the absence of regulated and planned provision of upfront necessary infrastructure—i.e., water supply, sanitation systems, footpaths, and drainage—these services have to be retrofitted after housing has been built, into unplanned and dense conditions [2]. Often through the support of international aid initiatives, have tried to address this in several ways, such as on-site sanitation provision and other forms of decentralised wastewater treatment (i.e., drainage, collective septic systems). Except for a small number of successful examples [3,4,5], these initiatives have increasingly failed to be sustained over time [6]

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