All Rights ReservedWatson, VanessaNgau, PeterAgunbiade, MuyiwaKombe, WilbardKalabamu, Faustin2025-02-132025-02-132016978-85-7785-551-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/2689Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southSub-Saharan Africa is urbanising rapidly with suggestions that many cities will double in size over the next twenty years. This growth is taking place in a context of limited state resources to spend on urban infrastructure, limited urban tax revenue to contribute to the infrastructure demand, high levels of poverty and inequality, low formal job creation and under-capacitated local and national governments. Informal settlements as a form of shelter are the norm rather than the exception in many parts of the continent. A particularly serious concern is that planning and land management frameworks are inappropriate as tools to manage this rapid growth, leaving many African cities with severe urban land use institutional deficits including inappropriate concepts, legislation, norms and standards. Many African cities have a combination of ‘modern’ and traditional land tenure systems with these processes often working in parallel with each other. And in addition the intensification of informal and unregulated property markets results in a widening gap between formal and informal sectors as well as growing conflicts between state and non-state actors. This round table will focus on the issue of land and planning conflicts in four major African cities. While the cities themselves (Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Nairobi and Gaborone), and these countries, are very different in many ways, there are significant commonalities in terms of relationships between formal and informal land processes, how the poor attempt to secure land, and how both the state and ‘formal’ private sector respond to this. At the same time there are new coping strategies, new collaborations and new ‘ways of doing’ in African cities that could suggest innovative ways forward in the future.EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject87-89