The underlying research project was sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the funding programme Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management (REFINA). REFINA is implemented by the BMBF in cooperation with the Federal...

Ramsar Resolution XI.17 requested the Convention’s Scientific and Technical Review Panel to report on the state of the world’s wetlands and their services to people. As a contribution to this task, this Briefing Note summarizes and highlights for Contracting Parties and other decision makers...

In this article, Professor Kaswan argues that hoped-for greenhouse gas reductions cannot be achieved without reducing consumption. Given their control over land use and buildings, cities can play a key role in reducing consumption. She argues that, while existing federal proposals for a...

Urban land governance is one of the central challenges not just for urban but also more broadly for global development in times of rapid urbanisation. This paper advances a fresh perspective to look at urban land by exploring to what extent it could be characterised as a resource curse problem....

Over the last twenty years, there has been a growing fascination within public and academic circles about the livelihood of islands with small populations and territory which are present in each of the world's great oceans. The Small Island Tourism Economies analysed in this paper vary...

This article seeks to explore the relationship between the growing phenomenon of globalization and the field of housing rights. I begin with a general description of globalization, and move on to discuss its effect on homelessness, and on housing systems across the world. I examine the role of...

This paper contrasts two dominant views of migration. One involves movements to arbitrage disequilibrium in labor markets, while the other takes a more urban economic view of equilibrium in which on-going migration is seen as a response to changing demands for non-traded amenities as incomes...

This paper contributes to this debate on the substantial risk-adjusted returns to real estate by first constructing a panel of housing risk premia for 13 OECD countries over a long sample period (1966: Q3 to 2004:Q4), and then exploring the relationship of these risk premia to changes in the...

Is it possible to count the earth's population from outer space? The answer is yes, in urban areas it is possible. However, this can only be done in an indirect manner: by identifying physical objects in the urban landscape in earth observation data and using these to estimate the number of...