While multiple studies have shown that a woman’s control over land is positively associated with bargaining power outcomes, few have succeeded in highlighting successful methods for increasing this control. We report on a policy experiment in an unplanned settlement in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that provided access to formal land titles to informal settlers at randomized prices, with additional ...

Agriculture began in the eastern Mediterranean Levantine Corridor about 11 000 years ago toward the end of the Younger Dryas when aridity had diminished wild food resources. During the subsequent Climatic Optimum, agricultural villages spread rapidly but subsequent climatic changes on centennial to millennial scales resulted in striking 5 oscillations in settlement, especially in marginal areas...

The paper presents a theoretical model that seeks to answer the question of why former squatter settlements tend to upgrade/redevelop at a slower pace than otherwise similar settlements originating in the formal sector. We argue that squatter settlers’ initial strategy to access urban land creates a ‘legacy effect’ that curtails settlement upgrading possibilities even after the settlements are ...

n 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) held its historic Congress of the People to ratify its liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This event took place in Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto (fig. 1, above), at a site that came to be called Freedom Square in honor of the occasion. Today Freedom Square is an open, windswept tract of land, lying between a shack settlement, a railway ...

The highly distinctive and mostly endemic Australian land mammal fauna has suffered an extraordinary rate of extinction (>10% of the 273 endemic terrestrial species) over the last ∼200 y: in comparison, only one native land mammal from continental North America became extinct since European settlement. A further 21% of Australian endemic land mammal species are now assessed to be threatened, in...

Conversion of rangelands into cultivated land is one of the main challenges affecting the management of rangelands in Ethiopia. In order to inform policy makers about trends in land-use conversion, this study examined the drivers, trends, and impacts of land conversions in five locations selected in the Borana rangelands of Southern Ethiopia. This study integrated survey interviews from agro-pa...

In an area like the Jharia coal® eld ( JCF), where extensive and rapid underground and opencast mining is going on continuously, land-use studies are of paramount importance. This paper discusses the remote sensing-GIS techniques used for identi® cation of various land-use classes on satellite imagery and enhanced products and identi® cation of time-sequential changes in land-use patterns. The ...

Conservation and restoration goals are often defined by historical baseline conditions that occurred prior to a particular period of human disturbance, such as European settlement in North America. Nevertheless, if ecosystems were heavily influenced by native peoples prior to European settlement, conservation efforts may require active management rather than simple removal of or reductions in r...

The Australian landscape, as in many countries, has undergone a significant change. The extent of native forests in Australia has steadily decreased over time since European settlement. The establishment of towns and cities, mining and a range of other factors have all reduced forest cover, however it is land clearing for agriculture that has been the most significant process by far. Along with...

Two new global urban products have recently appeared: the Global Urban Footprint (GUF) and the Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL). This paper evaluates the GUF and GHSL for the city of Milan, Italy through comparison with two European Union (EU) land use/cover reference products, namely the Urban Atlas and LUCAS. The results demonstrate that the GUF and GHSL are very similar to each other and...