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This book brings together a range of papers concerned with how legal institutions and related public policies affect housing and urban development in developing countries. A major contribution of the editors is that they have translated 4 of the 14 chapters. The collection is divided into three sections: an introduction on legal research in developing countries; case studies of legal, landrelated issues; and conclusions and future trends. Like any edited collection, this one is highly uneven: some of the papers offer little more than a descriptive overview of how legal systems (both formal and informal) operate, while other papers offer brilliant insights into the intricacies of informal land and property systems.
The editors offer a brief overview of the collection, and pose a series of organising questions raised by urban legal research in developing countries. From the authors' point of view, the most serious issue is the fact that most urban legal research in developing countries takes a positivist position that law is an autonomous politically neutral domain of knowledge (see pp. 4-6). As a result, many researchers and policy analysts view the law as a tool to correct market imperfections and foster economic development. On a policy level, this leads to recommendations to 'regularise' or to offer formal title to the occupants of land and housing that has been illegally subdivided or occupied.
This positivist orientation, the...