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Securing property rights in both rural landholdings and urban housing is a much-debated feature of current development policy. Providing title for the household does not guarantee security for women, and legal equality may fail to prevent gender differences in property ownership. A pro-active approach to women's property rights is needed. Disenchantment with state programs delivering individual titles has led to calls for alternative strategies emphasizing local or customary authorities and procedures. This paper questions the ability of either approach to address gender inequalities effectively without affirmative action but suggests that informal responses within state institutions can help. Key words--gender, urban property, formalization, Latin America, Mexico

Hernando de Soto's book The mystery of capital has renewed debate about illegality in low-income housing in Latin America, Asia and Africa. De Soto and others argue that property titles provide the poor with collateral for loans to improve their housing or set up a business. Critics argue that incorporation into the formal market will displace the original inhabitants. In this article I analyse these debates about legalization as expressions of the dualisms that have shaped western thought. The relation between legal and illegal can be understood as a variant of the public/private dichotomy. Challenging the opposition of legal to illegal, I argue that the difference between them is not as great as the proponents of legalization assume. This questions the efficacy of legalization as an engine of change. In Mexico, the beneficiaries of legalization have little interest in formal credit, preferring loans from friends or relatives, and legalization does not lead to displacement. The failure of theories about legalization to predict the outcome is a product of their reliance on dualistic thinking and of the exclusion of the private from their accounts of the process.

This paper explores the validity of the statement that one-third of the world's households are headed by women. It examines the implications of using economic criteria to define household headship and of recent interest in woman-maintained households and concealed woman-headed households. There is a danger of underplaying the diversity of woman-headed households and of marginalizing older women by identifying woman-headed households with single mothers of dependent children. Ultimately, too narrow a focus on particular household types undermines our ability to further a truly gendered analysis of the household in development research and practice.

On the Line is a thorough and moving piece of investigative reporting by Canadian journalist Augusta Dwyer. It is difficult to imagine how even those readers without a particular existing [...]