Trading places

Trading Places is about a new understanding of how people living in African cities access land and renegotiate real estate markets. It explores how local practice, land governance and markets interact to shape the ways that people at society's margins access land to build their livelihoods.

Rather than developing new policies that aim to supply land and housing formally but with little effect on the scale of the need, Trading Places advocates an alternative approach that recognises the local practices that already exist in land access and management. In this way, the agency of the poor is strengthened, and households and communities are better able to integrate into urban economies.

This resource is the result of seven years of work developing pro-poor interventions to make urban land markets work better. The work included building up a new body of evidence, engaging in policy change processes, broad-based stakeholder engagement, and testing the new approach in different sites. It is a collective effort by a range of people working with Urban Land Markets Programme, Southern Africa.