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Land titling has been a policy priority for developing country cities for decades. In Sub-Saharan Africa and across the world, tenure formalization has been promoted as a tool to improve the quality and value of urban housing. The track record of these projects, however, has generally been disappointing. Why is this? This paper argues that project design has paid too little attention to contextual features of land markets in estimating the benefits of formalization to individual households. The paper draws on evidence from a case study city — Dar es Salaam, Tanzania — to show that in cities where broader property rights institutions are incomplete and informal sources of tenure security are strong, formal property rights may not be valued by households. This raises questions about the households' willingness to pay for regularization and suggests that complementary strategies to build trust in government and consolidate public benefits of titling will be needed to ensure that projects have a beneficial impact.

The efficiency and productivity of Colombia's urban system will be a key determinant in the ability of the country to transition from a middle to a higher income economy. Economic growth is strongly driven by commodities in Colombia and other Latin American countries. However, the contribution of urban activities to urban growth is non-negligible when all urban activities are added. Strengthening the roles of cities may contribute to mitigating the risks inherent to commodity intensive economies and can support a stronger resource-based manufacturing economic structure and more knowledge intensive industries. In addition, a well functioning urban system is important for quality of life in a country with a highly urban population: almost 80 percent of Colombians live in urban areas, and urbanization is correlated with poverty reduction and improved access to basic services. The Colombia Urbanization Review: Amplifying the Gains from the Urban Transition aims to provide diagnostic tools to inform policy dialogue and investment priorities on urbanization by operationalizing the framework for urban policy developed in the 2009 World Development Report, Reshaping Economic Geography and the Bank's new Urban and Local Government Strategy, System of Cities: Harnessing Urbanization for Growth and Poverty Reduction. The review was implemented in two stages. A first stage looked at the system of cities in Colombia and identified a series of bottlenecks that limit the efficiency of the system. Three key topics were identified from the first phase diagnostics for further analysis in the second phase, in close discussion with the Department of National Planning. The three cross-cutting topics identified for a policy 'deep dive' in phase two were:deepening economic connectivity, enhancing coordination at a regional and metropolitan scale, and fostering

AbstractThis paper explores the role of savings groups in resilience to urban climate-related disasters. Savings groups are a rapidly growing phenomenon in Africa. They are decentralized, non-institutional groups that provide millions of people excluded from the formal banking sector with a trusted, accessible, and relatively simple source of microfinance. Yet there is little work on the impacts of savings groups on resilience to disasters. In this paper, we use a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence from Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) to shed new light on the role that savings groups play in helping households cope with climate-related shocks. Drawing on new data, we show that approximately one-quarter of households have at least one member in a group, and that these households recover from flood events faster than those who do not. We further argue that the structure of savings groups allows for considerable group oversight, reducing the high costs of monitoring and sanctioning that often undermine cooperative engagement in urban areas. This makes the savings group model a uniquely flexible form of financing that is well adapted to helping households cope with shocks such as repeated flooding. In addition to this, we posit that they may provide a foundation for community initiatives focusing on preventative action.