Kosovo’s urban landscape has been increasingly dominated by the colour of new bricks. The rapid flourishing of constructions is one of the most striking aspects of the post-conflict period. Although precise data and numbers are always elusive, cities such as Pristina are clearly showing that the process of urban land development has intensified recently. This process has taken many shapes, ranging from the precarious occupations - of their own or someone else’s private land, or of public or socially-owned land - by poor people and minority social groups such as the Roma/Ashkaeli/Egyptian “mahalas”, to more consolidated forms of land development generating middle-class neighbourhoods. Many, if not most, of these situations have been the result of informal development (another process of difficult definition and even more difficult estimation in numbers), in that, to different extents and in different ways, the prevailing legal provisions have been disregarded, either because of legal problems of land ownership, or because of the lack of respect for the urban planning and construction regulations in force.

However, there are several common aspects in both the neighbourhoods resulting from informal development and those neighbourhoods in which the laws have been fully observed, namely: the dense occupation of the areas; the lack of spaces for collective infrastructure and collective equipment; the absence of green areas; and the lack of proper integration of the neighbourhoods with the overall road system. While there is a general expectation that all informal settlements should be legalised, there is also a widespread assumption that it is the obligation of the public authorities, especially at the municipal level, to provide all such areas with the necessary infrastructure and public services, by means of public money and, if necessary, through expropriation procedures. In fact, international officials have continuously called for the central and municipal governments to fulfil their obligations towards the materialisation of the right to adequate housing, including the provision of a degree of legal security of tenure for persons lacking it.[1] This recommendation has focused, nevertheless, in impoverished Roma/Ashkaeli and Egyptian neighbourhoods, such as the ‘Roma Mahala’ and Du Korriku/Sitnicko Naselje in Mitrovicë/MitrovicaMunicipality.

The general situation in Kosovo is more easily understandable in an informal neighbourhood such as Kalabria/Emshiri, Pristina’s “muddy neighbourhood”, where, while the vast majority of the residents (most of them Kosovo Albanians) have paid for their plots of land, it was the original landowner who determined the fundamentally improvised and unbalanced layout of the land development, thus maximising his profits at the expense of the overall physical and environmental conditions of the neighbourhood. Some 15,000 people live in precarious conditions in a dense neighbourhood where, among other problems, there are few streets, some of which are so narrow that the normal circulation of vehicles is not possible; there are few public spaces and green areas; most of the basic infrastructure – especially drainage and sanitation – is missing; and there is no clear demarcation of public pavements.

However, the fact that also in other formally developed, wealthier neighbourhoods of Pristina the same process of dense occupation and lack of public spaces can be easily identified clearly shows that there is a fundamental gap in Kosovo’s emerging legal framework governing the processes of land development – namely, the lack of proper regulation of the process of land subdivision.

There is a growing concern among policymakers and urban managers with the need both to regularise consolidated informal settlements (and existing, still illegal constructions) and to regulate future constructions according to sounder urban planning and environmental criteria, and not only by means of formally legalising them. Indeed, many of the changes that have been proposed to the Law on Spatial Planning in force clearly express this concern for new constructions to be better located vis-à-vis the existing roads and neighbours, so that better circulation and ventilation conditions can be ensured.[2] Nevertheless, this is not enough: both in the current law and in the proposed changes there are no adequate legal provisions establishing criteria for the approval of this most important process of land development, land subdivision, through which an undivided tract of land is subdivided into plots for construction with the opening of a road or of road system. Together with the growing process of vertical occupation of existing plots (through the construction of blocks of apartments), it is basically through the horizontal annexation of previously undivided areas that cities grow.

In order to establish basic conditions for a sustainable land governance policy, it is fundamental to ensure that adequate principles are defined and legally entrenched to govern this structural process. The urban legislation should consider the following issues, among others: