5.1. In land market process
The most important problem for the urban planning process, caused by the development of urban land market, is the great inadequacy of supply for land. It is possible to see the incoherence of policies and procedures to conferring and registering rights and tittles of land access, control and use. The problematic situation is the concentration of all land supply power in the hand of central institution, such as DINAGECA or municipal department for construction/building and urbanisation, which imposes an unwarranted bottlenecks.
Although issues of land access, control, rights, tenure, registration and tittle are some of the most important factors determining the supply of urban land, they do not exhaust the set of constraints. Various regulations governing urban land use often have the same constraining effects on the number of serviced plots available on the market. Such regulations including those governing the minimum size of building plots, the floor area ratios, the setback distance of plots from road, the minimum extent of rights-of-way, as well as zoning regulations (Mabogunje, 1992).
The constraints in making land easily available trough the formal governing mechanism were such as to force people, desperately to provide themselves with shelter, to seek other avenues gaining access to land. The result has been the emergence of a dual land market system.
- The formal land market caters to middle and upper classes and is generally mediated by estate agents who advertise in newspapers or whose offices are easily identified. However, this kind of system represents (account) a small proportion of land transactions and transfers. These transactions are usually in regard to estate laid out or approved by public authorities for which there are title certificates, deeds or conveyance documents.
- The informal land market system that is dominant in matter of land transactions and transfers. There are no advertising estate agents; there are instead land agents or brokers who serve as middleman between families who want to sell their land and individuals who are desirous of buying parcels of lands. Not infrequently, these families also employ the services of land surveyors to help with the sub-dividing of their land into plots and, where still acceptable, to register the layout with the Land Department of the government. These attestation of land transitions takes various forms from a mere issue of receipt for money received signed by both parties, to the drawing up of a formal conveyance document which is them formally exhausted and registered by a lawyer or a notary public.
Since land nationalisation in Mozambique has been treated purely as a legislative measure and has not entailed practical programs of responding expeditiously to the demand situation for urban land, most residents are forced to go, surreptitiously and illegally, to the informal market to purchase land and them to seek to secure a legal leasehold from the government. The usual charade is to pretend to have purchased the land, or to have owned it, well before the legislative measure to nationalise. The result is an increase in the time needed to complete the land registration process and therefore to reduce the rate of supply of land to the market.
The most characteristic feature of the urban land market in the Maputo and Matola, in particular, and in Mozambican cities, in general, is the lack of information about the volume transactions, the amount of changing hands, their general pattern of distribution within the city or their prices. The paucity of information makes for imperfect competition and gives rise to serious price distortions. Considerable distortion is also introduced into the market because of the very striking differences in the supply characteristics of land from the formal public and informal private sources:
- Land supply from formal public sources tends to be secure in its tenure and in some cases already serviced at least by road.
- Land supply from informal private sources tends to have a great risk and a perpetual treat of losing it in litigation.
The result is that land supply from formal sources tends to be a premium, while the price of land purchased in the informal market is variable depending on the relative astuteness of the two parties involved.
These factors introduce themselves a further distortion into the land market. Between the initial allocation to individuals by the state and subsequent private transactions of the same plot in the land market, the price difference can be as much as one time, especially if the plot of land is in the most socially select areas of the cities.
All of these distortions in the land market send confusing signals to agencies concerned with the systematic layout, subdivision and development of building plots in the cities.
5.2. In urban planning process
The Building and Urbanisation Directorate or office – Direcзгo de Construзгo e Urbanizaзгo (DCU) - of Maputo and Matola cities are expected to be the primary agency for the supply of urban land. The well-known pervasive ineffectiveness of this agency is not simply a product of the contradictory price signals from the market. Much is due to the defects and outmoded nature of the legislative instruments that establish them.
Under the law, the DCU of Matola and Maputo cities are responsible for the preparation of schemes for the provision of serviced urban lands (further information in the Lei dos Municнpios).
Given the fact that the planning agencies (DCU) lack the necessary logistical support, it is no wonder that few planning schemes meant that planning authorities perceived their task as one of planning the development of little enclaves (or schemes) of land here and there, rather than taking a holistic view of the growth and development of the cities.
Beyond the preparation of such planning schemes the DCU go to production of a physical master plan, which attempt to represent the future growth of the cities with proposals for zoning, density control, route alignment, wide green belt separating neighbourhoods of different social classes, low-density and low-rise buildings, wide streets based on the expectation of a highly motorised population, and high standards of housing and infrastructural development.
In spite of the master plan, the general situation has been that the DCU pay little attention to situations and developments in most parties of the municipalities and have very little information on what is happening in regard to the demand of land. Consequently, the urgency and the priority that needs to be given to the serviced land provision makes little input on the official consciousness.
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