Trading places: accessing land in African cities

Abstract

This book provides an analytical perspective that is rigorously informed by detailed empirical work, and offers policy advice that is pragmatically grounded in the realities of governance and everyday urban life. Trading Places provides no quick fix, but rather a perspective that allows us to ‘cope with complexity’ and a set of proposals to progressively reshape the relationship between the market, the state, and the urban poor. It requires us to be ‘more nuanced, more incremental, more patient’, but offers us the hope that this approach will lead to land markets that will work more equitably and to state interventions that are more responsive to the lives and needs of the urban poor.