A Theory of Urban Squatting and Land-Tenure Formalization in Developing Countries

By Jan K. Brueckner, H. Selod. Social Science Research Network, 2008

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper offers a new theoretical approach to urban squatting, reflecting the view that squatters and formal residents compete for land within a city. The key implication of this view is that squatters ``squeeze" the formal market, raising the price paid by formal residents. The squatter organizer, however, ensures that this squeezing is not too severe, since otherwise the formal price will rise to a level that invites eviction by landowners (defensive expenditures by squatter households also help to forestall eviction). Because eviction is thus absent in equilibrium, the model differs crucially from previous analytical frameworks, where eviction occurs with some probability.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/26713bb7149080b18668c81a10636eebde19a620

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In Economics and Econometrics

In Soil Science

In Urban Studies

Citations in the corpus

Growing through Cities in Developing Countries (2014, unknown): “Parallel to the work cited above, recent works have investigated the political economy of squatting in developing cities (Feler and Henderson 2011) and modelled the micro-functioning of squatter settlements and eviction (Brueckner and Selod 2009).”
Cities in Developing Countries: Fueled by Rural–Urban Migration, Lacking in Tenure Security, and Short of Affordable Housing (2015, background): “Nevertheless, the eviction threat is the foundation of most research on squatting, although one line of theoretical work (Brueckner and Selod, 2009, Brueckner, 2013, Shah, 2014) addresses this apparent conflict by explaining how eviction can both be threatened and absent.”