Rethinking urbanization and economic development: a synopsis.

This is especially true for post-conflict countries with authoritarian governments and poorly developed property regimes and cadastral systems. Tahir, acknowledging both the bottom-up and top-down characteristics of the state-building process, draws attention in particular to the issues of urban land governance, which he sees as a critical site for statecraft. It is more sensible for governments to focus on the character of urbanization and seek to improve how people and firms gain access to serviced land and property in cities. Tahir discusses its state-building process, going beyond the more common focus on peacebuilding and democratization to explore the crafting of the legal and administrative regimes that shape governance and the lived experience of the residents of Somaliland's cities. [Extracted from the article]