Currently, heritage is challenged in the Indian city of Surat due to diverse pressures, including rapid urbanization, increasing housing demand, and socio-cultural and climate changes. Where rapid demographic growth of urban areas is happening, heritage is disappearing at an alarming rate. Despite some efforts from the local government, urban cultural heritage is being neglected and historic buildings keep being replaced by ordinary concrete buildings at a worryingly rapid pace. Discussions of challenges and issues of Surat’s urban area is supported by a qualitative dataset, including in-depth semi-structured interviews and focus groups with local policy makers, planners, and heritage experts, triangulated by observation and a photo-survey of two historic areas. Findings from this study reveal a myriad of challenges such as: inadequacy of urban conservation management policies and processes focused on heritage, absence of skills, training, and resources amongst decision makers and persistent conflict and competition between heritage conservation needs and developers’ interests. Furthermore, the values and significance of Surat’s tangible and intangible heritage is not fully recognized by its citizens and heritage stakeholders. A crucial opportunity exists for Surat to maximize the potential of heritage and reinforce urban identity for its present and future generations. Surat’s context is representative of general trends and conservation challenges and therefore recommendations developed in this study hold the potential to offer interesting insights to the wider planners and conservationists’ international community. This paper recommends thoughtful integration of sustainable heritage urban conservation into local urban development frameworks and the establishment of approaches that recognize the plurality of heritage values.

The urban development and management challenges of the developing world are well documented in the literature. However, the global built environment landscape is undergoing rapid changes. These changes are steeped in three fundamental imperatives, which have serious implications for the developing world. These imperatives are population growth and rising urbanisation; environmental challenges, particularly climate change and the quest to embrace sustainability as a panacea; and advances in technological development. This paper discusses these three imperatives with the view to teasing out their implications for urban development and management in the developing world. Consistent with the literature, the paper establishes that most of the population growth and rising urbanisation are occurring in the developing world, particularly Africa and Asia, and although these phenomena have the tendency to increase economic density and promote both private and public investment in urban development, especially construction/housing and related infrastructure activities, there are and will be several problems with them. These include land tenure insecurity, lack of access to decent affordable housing and the threat of destruction to heritage sites. Furthermore, environmental challenges such as poor waste management, and climate change are and will remain pressing issues requiring the adoption of sustainability credentials because of legislative requirements, moral suasion, and value addition. Despite the potential disruptive nature of technology with respect to some aspects of the built environment, it is recognised that advances in technology are essential to the achievement of optimal urban development and management outcomes in the developing world. The paper, therefore, recommends better understanding of the socio-economic, cultural, and political forces underlying urban growth in the developing world, factoring in technology and sustainability in urban development and management, and collaboration among relevant actors, particularly government and the private sector, for optimal outcomes.

The real estate valuation literature on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) shows a growing concern over valuation errors, especially wide variation in valuations. Although there have been increased business and investment activities in the last decade or more in the region, these valuation errors pose a challenge to the maturity of SSA real estate markets as valuations promote transparency and support efficient operation of property markets. Based on archival and survey data, as well as insights from the task complexity discourse, this study examines the extent of variations in valuations and the effect of complex valuation tasks on the levels of the variations in Ghana. The study finds high levels of variations in valuation opinions of 33.6–63% for the archival and survey data, respectively. These levels of variations are substantially higher than have been reported in the literature for advanced markets suggesting that the concerns of valuation errors in SSA may be well grounded. Consistent with theory, it is further established that variations in valuation opinions may be more pronounced in comparatively more complex assignments. These findings have several implications including possible loss of confidence of market players in valuations, heightening of market uncertainty and increase in transaction costs.

Volumes of discourse illuminate several weaknesses of Nigeria’s urban planning and governance system, particularly in the face of rapid urbanisation, and rising levels of urban poverty and informality. However, this discourse often fails to situate the weaknesses within the context of opportunities presented by the system, and provide a clear policy direction. An in-depth understanding of the weaknesses of the system, and of the opportunities it presents especially for the ongoing construction of massively scaled urban developments to meet demands of various urban actors and their impact, is imperative for far-reaching policy formulation and implementation. Based on an examination of the perspectives of key urban stakeholders solicited through semi-structured interviews in three Nigerian cities of Abuja, Minna and Enugu, this study provides insight into how the failings of the existing regime provide opportunities for the urban developmental landscape. The findings suggest that pluralistic forms of social...