innovations for land management, governance, and land rights for sustainable urban transitions: the middle eastern perspectives

The transformation of the built environment during the last few decades has placed enormous demands for land on the built environment. About 7.7 billion people now live on the planet, and that number is expected to increase by 2.5-3.0 billion in just 30 years, with the highest growth projected to be in less developed regions (H. De Soto, Foreword 2021). This increase should occupy a habitable land of 15 million hectares to accommodate around 500 million housing units with an average density of 200 persons per hectare. Although the rate of natural increase is slowing down, migration to cities is already at a higher rate than the natural population growth (Zimmermann 2021). It is projected that the number of people living in metropolises will increase to 3.47 billion by 2035, representing 39% of the global population and 62.5% of the world’s urban population. Based on these data, almost 1 billion people will become metropolitan inhabitants in the next fifteen years (UNHABITAT, Population Data booklet 2020). The populations of urban areas in the Global South are projected to increase by 1.2 billion by 2050, placing an enormous pressure on governments and the international community to provide the needed land to accommodate this population growth. This means that the potential of all recently natural resources of land need to be realized in full to make progress in enabling more people to shelter themselves. This is bound to subsequently transform cities -yielding several challenges, such as whether cities can finance or meet basic provision of services and habitable land for millions of new citizens.

Ahmed Soliman: During more than thirty years of professional practice, Professor Soliman has undertaken consultancy, research, training and teaching assignments in Egypt, Lebanon, Britain and Algeria. He established a consultant office in the early 1980s under the name of Architectural and Planning Studies Center, located in Tanta city, to practice architecture and planning carrier. Soliman holds the chair of the Architecture Department, Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Egypt (2007-2012), and was the Faculty of Architectural Engineering dean at Beirut Arab University, Lebanon (2000-2004). He has also written, edited or contributed to many publications and participated in international and national conferences and workshops. He specializes in urban housing, urban development, and architecture design. He has supervised and designed several premises in Egypt. He had worked for international agencies and organizations in Britain and Peru. He is an external associate adviser to Egypt’s Ministry of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities. He is also a GIS specialist (Geographic Information System) and has carried out several planning projects using GIS tools. Prof. Soliman authorizes A Possible Way Out: Formalizing Housing Informality in Egyptian Cities, University Press of America, 2004, and Urban Informality: Experiences and Urban Sustainability Transitions in Middle East Cities, Springer,2021.

Ramin Keivani is an urban development specialist with a particular interest on the interface of economic globalization, development of land markets and urban growth and their impact on urban equity, particularly in relation to urban land policy and low-income housing delivery in the global South and transition economies. My most recent work focuses on urban social sustainability. I have also worked on other projects on housing delivery in the UK and healthy urban mobility. After completing the PhD at University College London, I worked for a period of time in the Middle East on urban development and planning in a number of cities in Iran before returning to the UK in 1997 to pursue my academic career. I taught at UCL and London South Bank universities before joining Brookes in 2003 to lead research and teach in the then Department of Real Estate and Construction and its successor School of the Built Environment. I also led the Real Estate and Land Policy research group of Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development between 2007-2019. Prof Keivani is on the steering committee of the UN-Habitat World Urban Campaign and the Global Network for Sustainable Housing. I am also the Founding Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development.