The Fourth Urban Research Symposium, organized by the World Bank in conjunction with some of its key partners, focused on “Urban Land Use and Land Markets”, including implications for city spatial growth, efficiency and equity. The symposium featured presentations of five commissioned survey papers on topics that have relevance for World Bank operations in Urban Development. These papers serve three objectives:

1. To clarify ongoing debates on the links between various aspects of urban land management and welfare by providing a robust analytic foundation to existing findings or supporting/questioning existing analytic work with empirical applications/case studies;

2. To examine the implications of commonly used urban land and related policies when conventional wisdom is scrutinized using a common methodological framework; and

3. To highlight priority policy and program design/implementation questions which cannot be answered due to limited research and data, and propose a research agenda that sets out to address these questions.

In addition to these commissioned papers, the World Bank invited researchers working on land related issues to contribute papers, especially those with empirical evidence relevant to any of the following research clusters (outlined in detail in the Concept Note document). See list of papers accepted for presentation.

Cluster 1: Implications of various land market distortions on urban welfare/quality of life, particularly for the poor; and consequences of these distortions on the efficacy of bank/government interventions.

Cluster 2: Implications of the continuum of property claims/rights and associated formalization strategies that exist in developing country cities and access to credit, municipal infrastructure and public services.

Cluster 3: Elements of good practice for public land management.

Cluster 4: Institutions for urban land management and economic performance.

Cluster 5: Practices and experience with public land acquisition, particularly as related to infrastructure and to urban development and redevelopment.

Cluster 6: Other

The deadline for the Call for Papers was August 31, 2006.  The contributions we received were evaluated primarily on the extent to which they provided rigorous empirical analyses related to the identified research clusters. Also important was the extent to which they focused on the implications for developing and/or transition economies and relevance to policy and program instruments.