There is a great amount of effort worldwide to understand the problems of shelter, access to land and security of tenure for the urban poor, but very little attention to the mechanics of policy implementation. In other words there is little attention to the practical or “engineering” side of designing, building and managing land administration infrastructures which facilitate shelter, security ...

Current land administration systems are the product of 19th century economic and land market paradigms and have failed to properly support sustainable development. The need for urgent reform is accepted, but the way forward unclear in many jurisdictions. This paper will discuss current international initiatives and research to develop a new land administration vision to promote sustainable deve...

Globalization is being driven by global economic integration, the spread of technology and the democratization of information. In the process it is fundamentally altering the way we think about economic, social and cultural development. This paper reviews what is meant by globalization from a variety of perspectives and then briefly examines the impact it is having on the land administration fi...

Currently there are no internationally accepted methodologies to evaluate and compare the performance of land administration systems. To engage in this discussion, the authors published a previous article proposing an evaluation framework, which – based on a management model – links the operational aspects of land administration with land policy. In this new article, the framework is being appl...

We define the notion of a Kirby element of a ribbon category C (not necessarily semisimple). Kirby elements lead to 3-manifolds invariants. We characterize a set of Kirby elements (in terms of the structural morphisms of a Hopf algebra in C) which is sufficiently large to recover the quantum invariants of 3-manifolds of Reshetikhin-Turaev, of Hennings-Kauffman-Radford, and of Lyubashenko. The c...

As our urban environments are densifying, it is essential to extend traditional cadastral systems that are based on two dimensional representation of ownership to support 3D. With the need to define property ownership in vertical as well as horizontal dimensions becoming pertinent around the world, a practical solution to represent 3D cadastral data is needed. The Land Administration Domain Mod...

With the existence of mature technologies and modern urban planning necessities, there is a growing public demand to improve the efficiency and transparency of government administrations. This includes the formation of a comprehensive modern spatial land management (cadastre) system having the capacity to handle various types of data in a uniform way—above-terrain and below-terrain—enabling the...

Using a climate version of a regional atmospheric model, we show that the seasonal evolution of weather is dependent on the initial soil moisture and landscape specification. Coupling this model to a land-surface model, the soil moisture distribution and landscape are shown to cause a significant nonlinear interaction between vegetation growth and precipitation. These results demonstrate that s...