The Middle East and North Africa Urban Housing Practitioners Hub (MENA-UHPH) is organizing a virtual panel discussion to explore the potentials of using Land Value Capture (LVC) instruments to finance the upgrading of informal areas.

The online session is a follow-up of the City Debates 2023, organized by the Master in Urban Planning, Policy and Design Programs at the American University in Beirut, the Beirut Urban Lab, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, with participation by the MENA-UHPH in the panel titled “Opportunities for Land Value Capture”.

This follow-up discussion seeks to further probe the use of LVC specifically for the upgrading of informal areas in cities of the Global South.

Many cities across the MENA region and the Global South more broadly have been grappling with the issue of pervasive informality. For example, Egyptian official statistics estimate that informal areas make up over 60% of urban areas across the country and house well over half of Egypt’s urban population.

In the absence of affordable housing in the formal housing market, the urban poor (and oftentimes even middle-class families) have sought shelter within the massive informal housing sector.

The housing provided in these informal areas has varying degrees of adequacy, but a large portion can be improved to meet the standards of adequate housing through targeted development interventions, such as housing renovation, infrastructure upgrading, street paving and lighting, greening, and in some cases de-densification and replanning.

This requires, however, a heavy financial contribution by the institutions responsible for informal area upgrading, and the lack of funds has sometimes hindered their ability to engage in slum regeneration. Land value capture instruments can potentially play an important role in fulfilling this financing gap, but are faced with a range of legislative and administrative hurdles.

There is a need to i) discuss recent experiences in using LVC to facilitate informal area upgrading; and ii) explore different potential instruments for the gains of LVC to be reaped not only by local government, but by local communities in informal areas, in a way that increases their access to adequate housing while also protecting them from gentrification and displacement.

The session took place on May 30th, 2023, and was chaired by Deena Khalil (Manager, MENA-UHPH), with Astrid Haas (Independent Urban Economist) as discussant.

The panel features

  • Ombretta Tempra (Land Specialist at UN-Habitat and Global Land Tool Network)
  • Samar Abdelkhalek (Local Development Specialist, World Bank Egypt)
  • Nico Calavita (Professor Emeritus in the Graduate Program in City Planning, San Diego State University)