This is a study of everyday life and the quality of living in a poor neighbourhood of Chitungwiza, an independent Zimbabwean town about thrity kilometres south of Harare city centre.

Improved housing conditions can save lives, prevent disease, increase quality of life, reduce poverty, and help mitigate climate change. Housing is becoming increasingly important to health in light of urban growth, ageing populations and climate change. The WHO Housing and health guidelines bring together the most recent evidence to provide practical recommendations to reduce the health burden due to unsafe and substandard housing. Based on newly commissioned systematic reviews, the guidelines provide recommendations relevant to inadequate living space (crowding), low and high indoor temperatures, injury hazards in the home, and accessibility of housing for people with functional impairments. In addition, the guidelines identify and summarize existing WHO guidelines and recommendations related to housing, with respect to water quality, air quality, neighbourhood noise, asbestos, lead, tobacco smoke and radon. The guidelines take a comprehensive, intersectoral perspective on the issue of housing and health and highlight co-benefits of interventions addressing several risk factors at the same time. The WHO Housing and health guidelines aim at informing housing policies and regulations at the national, regional and local level and are further relevant in the daily activities of implementing actors who are directly involved in the construction, maintenance and demolition of housing in ways that influence human health and safety. The guidelines therefore emphasize the importance of collaboration between the health and other sectors and joint efforts across all government levels to promote healthy housing. The guidelines' implementation at country-level will in particular contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals on health (SDG 3) and sustainable cities (SDG 11). WHO will support Member States in adapting the guidelines to national contexts and priorities to ensure safe and healthy housing for all.

Are Africa's most populous and economically dominant cities a force to reckon with in the twenty-first century? This book analyzes the economies of East and Southern Africa's 'apex' cities, probing how they have altered structurally over time and their current sources of economic vitality and vulnerability at local, national and international levels. Case study chapters focusing on Johannesburg, Chitungwiza, Gaborone, Maputo, Dar es Salaam, Mombasa, Nairobi, Kampala and Mogadishu shed new light on contemporary African urban prospects and problems.

The aim of this book is to bring methods of land-market and land-price analysis to the foreground. It relates substantive research findings for land and urban development and blends these with a focus on research design and methodology. Its findings have relevance beyond the topics of housing and land: it broaches the whole question of how research design and general approach may lead to fundamentally different findings, different priorities, and different policy prescriptions and preoccupations. It is based on work done in the Third World, but is also relevant to studies of the industrialized world.

In the past few years the issue of land invasion and government reposnses to landlessness in the Southern African region has been at the forefront of international attention. By confronting the the questions of exclusion and unlawful occupation this book examines the appropriateness of the informal settlement response in South Africa through a comparison with Brazil. This detailed comparison sets forth the difference in the approaches of both countries, with South Africa employing the individualised, standardised intervention and Brazil a more responsive one.