Gordon Mcgranahan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3450417 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gordon Mcgranahan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gordon |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgranahan |
| SIGNATURE | MCGRANAHAN G |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stockholm Environment Institute |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1427-9570 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 477 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Is rapid urbanization of low-elevation deltas undermining adaptation to climate change? A global review
Climate change is putting low-lying coastal zones at increased risk, through higher sea levels and changes in the weather. Deltas are subsiding, compounding such risks. Confirming past research, we find roughly 10 per cent of the world’s population and an even higher share of its urban population are located in coastal areas under 10 metres in elevation (LECZ10), with Asia dominating these statistics. However, according to our estimates for 2015,…
Self-builder landlordism
The churn of the land nexus and contrasting gentrification processes in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, Tanzania
This article contrasts gentrification and related processes of displacement across two of Tanzania’s fastest-growing cities. Some groups are particularly vulnerable to gentrification, with smallholder farmers particularly vulnerable on the periphery, and tenants particularly vulnerable near the centre. In the cities’ newly urbanizing peripheries, many of the longest-standing residents from farming families sell their land to upwardly mobile newco…
Informal land investments and wealth accumulation in the context of regularization
Between half and three-quarters of new housing development in African cities has been taking place on land acquired through informal channels. This paper offers insights from a study of self-builders’ investments in informal land and housing in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, two of the largest and fastest-growing cities in Tanzania. The findings demonstrate that self-builders’ investments in informal land and self-built housing are inextricably linked…
Resilience as a policy narrative
The aim of this paper is to analyse the emergence of the concept of ‘urban resilience’ in the literature and to assess its potentials and limitations as an element of policy planning. Using a systematic literature review covering the period 2003–2013 and a combination of techniques derived from narrative analysis, we show that diverse views of what urban resilience means and how it is best used (as a goal or as a conceptual/analytical framework) …
Learning from Sustained Success
Past research by one of the authors of this paper has identified four key institutional challenges that community-driven initiatives to improve sanitation in deprived urban settlements face: the collective action challenge of improving community sanitation; the coproduction challenge of working with formal service providers to dispose of the sanitary waste safely; the affordability challenge of reconciling the affordable with what is acceptable t…
The urban informal economy, local inclusion and achieving a global green transformation
The green economy is widely promoted as a 21st century solution to sustainable development. The role of cities in pursuing this agenda is increasingly recognised. Yet, the informal economy, which so many urban dwellers and workers in low- and middle-income countries depend upon, is seldom considered. This paper examines the opportunities and barriers that the urban informal economy pose for making economies greener, and the risks that such attemp…
Inclusive urbanization
Governments are wary of rapid urbanization, yet eager for the economic benefits that cities bring. The resulting tension is reflected in exclusionary cities created through strategies that privilege economic growth and result in many people being left behind. There is both exclusion from the city and exclusion and segregation in the city. This paper's redefinition of inclusion moves beyond a focus on identity-based disadvantage, to frame inclusio…
Urbanization
Sharing reflections on inclusive sanitation
This paper draws on sanitation innovations in Blantyre (Malawi), Chinhoyi (Zimbabwe), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kitwe (Zambia) driven by slum (1) /shack dweller federations to consider what an inclusive approach to sanitation would involve. This includes what is possible for low-income households when there is little or no external support, no piped water supply and no city sewers to connect to. The paper discusses low-income households’ choic…
Realizing the Right to Sanitation in Deprived Urban Communities
There are serious institutional challenges associated with low-cost sanitation in deprived urban communities. These include a collective action challenge, a coproduction challenge, a challenge of affordability versus acceptability, and a challenge related to housing tenure. This paper examines these challenges, revealing both the importance of community-driven sanitation improvement and its difficulties. The nature of the challenges, and the mean…
Urbanization and economic growth
The relationship between urbanization and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or b…
Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges
Scaling the Urban Environmental Challenge
Urbanization and economic growth are the two quantifiable trends of recent world history most closely associated with conventional ‘development’. Like development itself, they represent disputed concepts. The use of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ to describe different forms of human settlement is now being called into question by new indicators and settlement patterns (Champion and Hugo, 2004). Both the measures and meanings of economic growth are also bein…
The legacy of inequality and negligence in Brazil's unfinished urban transition
Compared to other developing countries in Asia and Africa, Brazil experienced an early urban transition. Cities, especially large ones, already concentrate most of the country's population and economic activity. However, an underlying structure of inequality persists in urban areas, reflecting a historical reluctance to accept urban growth or to steer markets and planned developments towards meeting the housing needs of the poor. This continues t…
Urban Health Inequities and the Added Pressure of Climate Change
Urbanization and its implications for food and farming
This paper discusses the influences on food and farming of an increasingly urbanized world and a declining ratio of food producers to food consumers. Urbanization has been underpinned by the rapid growth in the world economy and in the proportion of gross world product and of workers in industrial and service enterprises. Globally, agriculture has met the demands from this rapidly growing urban population, including food that is more energy-, lan…
Is urbanization contributing to higher food prices
Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices, and in this paper we examine some of the suggested links between urbanization and food prices. We conclude that urbanization, conventionally defined as the increasing share of the population living in urban settlements, is being conflated with related but separate processes, such as economic growth, population growth and environmental degradation. We discuss factors that…
The efforts of a federation of slum and shanty dwellers to secure land and improve housing in Moratuwa
In Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, the tsunami disaster of 2004 forced new ways of working on both organizations of the urban poor and local authorities. Building on this experience, an emerging federation of the urban poor (built on community savings groups) has been collaborating with local authorities to secure land and adequate housing in two deprived settlements unaffected by the tsunami. This article examines these recent initiatives and their citywid…
The rising tide
Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly. In this paper, we undertake the first global review of the population and urban settlement patterns in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), defined here as the contiguous area along the coast that is less than 10 metres above sea level. Overall, this zone covers 2 per cent of the world's l…
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena, and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor the benefits anticipa…
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anti…
The Political Economy of Household Environmental Management
Urban environmental management
Environment, wealth and health
presents findings from a study of household environmental problems that included a 1,000 household survey and tests for air and water pollution. After presenting a conceptual model summarizing key interactions between environment, wealth and health in Accra, the authors analyze intra-urban differentials in household environmental conditions by level of wealth and residential zone with particular emphasis on diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases amo…
The rising tide
Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly. In this paper, we undertake the first global review of the population and urban settlement patterns in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), defined here as the contiguous area along the coast that is less than 10 metres above sea level. Overall, this zone covers 2 per cent of the world's l…
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anti…
Urbanization and economic growth
The relationship between urbanization and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or b…
Inclusive urbanization
Governments are wary of rapid urbanization, yet eager for the economic benefits that cities bring. The resulting tension is reflected in exclusionary cities created through strategies that privilege economic growth and result in many people being left behind. There is both exclusion from the city and exclusion and segregation in the city. This paper's redefinition of inclusion moves beyond a focus on identity-based disadvantage, to frame inclusio…
Realizing the Right to Sanitation in Deprived Urban Communities
There are serious institutional challenges associated with low-cost sanitation in deprived urban communities. These include a collective action challenge, a coproduction challenge, a challenge of affordability versus acceptability, and a challenge related to housing tenure. This paper examines these challenges, revealing both the importance of community-driven sanitation improvement and its difficulties. The nature of the challenges, and the mean…
Learning from Sustained Success
Past research by one of the authors of this paper has identified four key institutional challenges that community-driven initiatives to improve sanitation in deprived urban settlements face: the collective action challenge of improving community sanitation; the coproduction challenge of working with formal service providers to dispose of the sanitary waste safely; the affordability challenge of reconciling the affordable with what is acceptable t…
Environment, wealth and health
presents findings from a study of household environmental problems that included a 1,000 household survey and tests for air and water pollution. After presenting a conceptual model summarizing key interactions between environment, wealth and health in Accra, the authors analyze intra-urban differentials in household environmental conditions by level of wealth and residential zone with particular emphasis on diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases amo…
The urban informal economy, local inclusion and achieving a global green transformation
The green economy is widely promoted as a 21st century solution to sustainable development. The role of cities in pursuing this agenda is increasingly recognised. Yet, the informal economy, which so many urban dwellers and workers in low- and middle-income countries depend upon, is seldom considered. This paper examines the opportunities and barriers that the urban informal economy pose for making economies greener, and the risks that such attemp…
Informal land investments and wealth accumulation in the context of regularization
Between half and three-quarters of new housing development in African cities has been taking place on land acquired through informal channels. This paper offers insights from a study of self-builders’ investments in informal land and housing in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, two of the largest and fastest-growing cities in Tanzania. The findings demonstrate that self-builders’ investments in informal land and self-built housing are inextricably linked…
Urban Health Inequities and the Added Pressure of Climate Change
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena, and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor the benefits anticipa…
Sharing reflections on inclusive sanitation
This paper draws on sanitation innovations in Blantyre (Malawi), Chinhoyi (Zimbabwe), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kitwe (Zambia) driven by slum (1) /shack dweller federations to consider what an inclusive approach to sanitation would involve. This includes what is possible for low-income households when there is little or no external support, no piped water supply and no city sewers to connect to. The paper discusses low-income households’ choic…
The Political Economy of Household Environmental Management
The legacy of inequality and negligence in Brazil's unfinished urban transition
Compared to other developing countries in Asia and Africa, Brazil experienced an early urban transition. Cities, especially large ones, already concentrate most of the country's population and economic activity. However, an underlying structure of inequality persists in urban areas, reflecting a historical reluctance to accept urban growth or to steer markets and planned developments towards meeting the housing needs of the poor. This continues t…
Is urbanization contributing to higher food prices
Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices, and in this paper we examine some of the suggested links between urbanization and food prices. We conclude that urbanization, conventionally defined as the increasing share of the population living in urban settlements, is being conflated with related but separate processes, such as economic growth, population growth and environmental degradation. We discuss factors that…
Fuelwood, subsistence foraging, and the decline of common property
Self-builder landlordism
The efforts of a federation of slum and shanty dwellers to secure land and improve housing in Moratuwa
In Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, the tsunami disaster of 2004 forced new ways of working on both organizations of the urban poor and local authorities. Building on this experience, an emerging federation of the urban poor (built on community savings groups) has been collaborating with local authorities to secure land and adequate housing in two deprived settlements unaffected by the tsunami. This article examines these recent initiatives and their citywid…
Household environmental problems in low-income cities
The churn of the land nexus and contrasting gentrification processes in Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, Tanzania
This article contrasts gentrification and related processes of displacement across two of Tanzania’s fastest-growing cities. Some groups are particularly vulnerable to gentrification, with smallholder farmers particularly vulnerable on the periphery, and tenants particularly vulnerable near the centre. In the cities’ newly urbanizing peripheries, many of the longest-standing residents from farming families sell their land to upwardly mobile newco…
Fuelwood, subsistence foraging, and the decline of common property
Environment, wealth and health
presents findings from a study of household environmental problems that included a 1,000 household survey and tests for air and water pollution. After presenting a conceptual model summarizing key interactions between environment, wealth and health in Accra, the authors analyze intra-urban differentials in household environmental conditions by level of wealth and residential zone with particular emphasis on diarrhoeal and respiratory diseases amo…
Urban ecology and health in the third world
Household environmental problems in low-income cities
Urban environmental management
The Political Economy of Household Environmental Management
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena, and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor the benefits anticipa…
Are the debates on water privatization missing the point? Experiences from Africa, Asia and Latin America
This paper has two principal aims: first, to unravel some of the arguments mobilized in the controversial privatization debate, and second, to review the scale and nature of private sector provision of water and sanitation in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Despite being vigorously promoted in the policy arena and having been implemented in several countries in the South in the 1990s, privatization has achieved neither the scale nor benefits anti…
The rising tide
Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly. In this paper, we undertake the first global review of the population and urban settlement patterns in the Low Elevation Coastal Zone (LECZ), defined here as the contiguous area along the coast that is less than 10 metres above sea level. Overall, this zone covers 2 per cent of the world's l…
The efforts of a federation of slum and shanty dwellers to secure land and improve housing in Moratuwa
In Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, the tsunami disaster of 2004 forced new ways of working on both organizations of the urban poor and local authorities. Building on this experience, an emerging federation of the urban poor (built on community savings groups) has been collaborating with local authorities to secure land and adequate housing in two deprived settlements unaffected by the tsunami. This article examines these recent initiatives and their citywid…
Urbanization and its implications for food and farming
This paper discusses the influences on food and farming of an increasingly urbanized world and a declining ratio of food producers to food consumers. Urbanization has been underpinned by the rapid growth in the world economy and in the proportion of gross world product and of workers in industrial and service enterprises. Globally, agriculture has met the demands from this rapidly growing urban population, including food that is more energy-, lan…
Is urbanization contributing to higher food prices
Urbanization has been mentioned as one possible cause of higher food prices, and in this paper we examine some of the suggested links between urbanization and food prices. We conclude that urbanization, conventionally defined as the increasing share of the population living in urban settlements, is being conflated with related but separate processes, such as economic growth, population growth and environmental degradation. We discuss factors that…
Urban Health Inequities and the Added Pressure of Climate Change
Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges
Scaling the Urban Environmental Challenge
Urbanization and economic growth are the two quantifiable trends of recent world history most closely associated with conventional ‘development’. Like development itself, they represent disputed concepts. The use of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ to describe different forms of human settlement is now being called into question by new indicators and settlement patterns (Champion and Hugo, 2004). Both the measures and meanings of economic growth are also bein…
The legacy of inequality and negligence in Brazil's unfinished urban transition
Compared to other developing countries in Asia and Africa, Brazil experienced an early urban transition. Cities, especially large ones, already concentrate most of the country's population and economic activity. However, an underlying structure of inequality persists in urban areas, reflecting a historical reluctance to accept urban growth or to steer markets and planned developments towards meeting the housing needs of the poor. This continues t…
Urbanization and economic growth
The relationship between urbanization and development is a vital policy concern, especially in Africa and Asia. This paper reviews the arguments and evidence for whether rapid urban population growth can help to raise living standards. The main finding is that the development effects of urbanization and the magnitude of agglomeration economies are very variable. There is no simple linear relationship between urbanization and economic growth, or b…
Urbanization
Sharing reflections on inclusive sanitation
This paper draws on sanitation innovations in Blantyre (Malawi), Chinhoyi (Zimbabwe), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Kitwe (Zambia) driven by slum (1) /shack dweller federations to consider what an inclusive approach to sanitation would involve. This includes what is possible for low-income households when there is little or no external support, no piped water supply and no city sewers to connect to. The paper discusses low-income households’ choic…
Realizing the Right to Sanitation in Deprived Urban Communities
There are serious institutional challenges associated with low-cost sanitation in deprived urban communities. These include a collective action challenge, a coproduction challenge, a challenge of affordability versus acceptability, and a challenge related to housing tenure. This paper examines these challenges, revealing both the importance of community-driven sanitation improvement and its difficulties. The nature of the challenges, and the mean…
Learning from Sustained Success
Past research by one of the authors of this paper has identified four key institutional challenges that community-driven initiatives to improve sanitation in deprived urban settlements face: the collective action challenge of improving community sanitation; the coproduction challenge of working with formal service providers to dispose of the sanitary waste safely; the affordability challenge of reconciling the affordable with what is acceptable t…
The urban informal economy, local inclusion and achieving a global green transformation
The green economy is widely promoted as a 21st century solution to sustainable development. The role of cities in pursuing this agenda is increasingly recognised. Yet, the informal economy, which so many urban dwellers and workers in low- and middle-income countries depend upon, is seldom considered. This paper examines the opportunities and barriers that the urban informal economy pose for making economies greener, and the risks that such attemp…
Inclusive urbanization
Governments are wary of rapid urbanization, yet eager for the economic benefits that cities bring. The resulting tension is reflected in exclusionary cities created through strategies that privilege economic growth and result in many people being left behind. There is both exclusion from the city and exclusion and segregation in the city. This paper's redefinition of inclusion moves beyond a focus on identity-based disadvantage, to frame inclusio…
Resilience as a policy narrative
The aim of this paper is to analyse the emergence of the concept of ‘urban resilience’ in the literature and to assess its potentials and limitations as an element of policy planning. Using a systematic literature review covering the period 2003–2013 and a combination of techniques derived from narrative analysis, we show that diverse views of what urban resilience means and how it is best used (as a goal or as a conceptual/analytical framework) …
Self-builder landlordism
Economics (21 works) · Economic growth (19 works) · Geography (19 works) · Business (15 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (13 works) · Political science (12 works) · Urbanization (9 works) · Population (8 works) · Development economics (7 works) · Natural resource economics (7 works)