Developing Sustainability Assessment of Informal Development on Illegal Land Subdivision Based on the Bequest Framework

Illegal land subdivision in developing countries as well as in the Eastern and Southern Europe has been a major feature of urbanisation. This type of development accommodates significant number of population who cannot meet their housing needs in the formal market. The residents of these areas buy the subdivided land and construct their houses, but outside the legal system. Government efforts to combat this phenomenon have two directions, one is to prevent the emergence of new subdivisions and the other is to deal with the existing settlements. The former has never changed up to date. The latter changed from ignorance to demolition to servicing the settlements and then to regularising the existing settlements since 1980s. The strategies and programmes for both the directions have not been implemented properly. There is an urgent need to understand and evaluate the existing situation and assess it in the content of sustainability. The BEQUEST framework which was developed early in this century is probably the only framework to help assessing the sustainability of formal urban development. There is no such framework to assess illegal development. This paper aims at developing a framework that can be used in the cases of illegal development. The analysis shows that the proposed framework differs from the BEQUEST one in the development activities. No changes are suggested to the set of sustainability issues and the time scale found in the BEQUEST framework while constructing the new framework