Other Publications

List of Other Publications

Complex Monograph on Engineering Geodesy

by Giorgi and Ivo Milev

An original work consisting of 5 books (the last two published at the end of 2022; a total of 2870 computer pages), each of which is defined as a system of monographs. Two more books have been uploaded to the Internet, representing a summary presentation of the complex monograph, respectively in English and Bulgarian. The work systematizes, summarizes, and comprehensively presents the main aspects of the construction activity, architecture, the layout of the territories and the place, and the role of geodesy – Engineering geodesy in their implementation, with the application of space and geospatial technologies.
Read more about these books and how to download them


Somewhere to Live: Rising to the global urban land and housing challenge

by Geoffrey Payne, 2022

Despite millions of people being lifted out of poverty during recent decades, finding somewhere decent and affordable to live is proving increasingly difficult in urban areas around the world.
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Research and Capacity Development Strategy for Land Governance Innovation in Southern Africa

by Charl-Thom Bayer, Stig Enemark and Michael Kirk, 2020

Eight contry case studies  together with the synthesis report (see below) will form the basis for future research, capacity development and policy innovation in the Southern Africa region. Ensuring that this happens in a systematic and coherent manner requires that the NUST-NELGA Hub develop this “Research and Capacity Development Strategy for Land Governance Innovation in Southern Africa” for the period 2020 to 2025.
Read the report



Land Governance in Southern Africa - Synthesis Report

NUST-NELGA Symposium 3-4 September 2019 in Windhoek, Namibia
by Charl-Thom Bayer, Stig Enemark and Michael Kirk.

This project on “Land Governance in Southern Africa” covers a description and
assessment of Land Governance in the Southern Africa Region (Africa mainland
south of Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo). The project stems from the NELGA (Network of Excellence on Land Governance in Africa) Initiative on promoting demand driven research on land policy issues and connecting scholars and researchers across Africa through academic networks.
Read the report


Geometer Dreams

Peter Byrne has written a book about his forty years as a surveyor. Writter as vignettes, the shortest being just one line, together with some longer essays and reflections, Geometer Dreams is about people, their interactions and the circumstances they met. The story settings range from the Pilbara district of Western Australia to the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, from Borneo through Zimbabwe to Brazil and the United Nations.

Michael D. Breen has written a review of Geometer Dreams.

Read the review and find more information about the book here


Surveying and Mapping

This book provides an introduction, at academic level, into the field of surveying and mapping. The book has been written for the third-year course Surveying and Mapping, in the bachelor program of Civil Engineering at Delft University of Technology. This book covers a wide range of measurement techniques, from land surveying, GPS/GNSS and remote sensing to the associated data processing, the underlying coordinate reference systems, as well as the analysis and visualization of the acquired geospatial information.

The book is freely available as an OPEN Textbook by the TU Delft library


Mission Earth

The book Mission Earth is aimed at interested nonprofessionals who want to learn more about our planet, but also at experts in natural sciences. Readers are taken on a journey through time from the first surveys in ancient times to the satellite era, which is providing us with a global view of our home planet. Using illustrative examples, the authors convey how deeply global positioning and navigation with satellites pervade our daily life, and what fundamental contributions geodesy makes to understanding the Earth system and determining the effects of climate change.

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Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration - Providing Secure Land Rights at Scale

This Special Issue of the open access Land Journal provides an insight, collated from 26 articles, focusing on various aspects of the Fit-For-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) concept and its application. It presents some influential and innovative trends and recommendations for designing, implementing, maintaining and further developing FFP solutions for providing secure land rights at scale.
Guest Editors: Prof Stig Enemark, Dr Robin McLaren, Prof Christiaan Lemmen

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Land Governance and Gender

The book is edited by Uchendu Eugene Chigbu, and delivers new conceptual and empirical studies surrounding the design and evaluation of land governance, focusing on land management approaches, land policy issues, advances in pro-poor land tenure and land-based gender concerns.
The book is available:

  • Open Access eBook
  • Hardback - to purchase - please use this discount code: CCFIG25 to get 25% discount on the hardback (valid until 31 December 2022 for individual orders up to a maximim of 10 copies per customer)

The future of BIM: Digital transformation in the UK construction and infrastructure sector

A new Insight Paper from RICS providing a useful insight into the progression of the BIM movement in the UK, charting the continued development and transition of standards to ISO, and the original work of the UK BIM Task Group extending out to the wider built environment industry, exemplified by the significant collaborative effort in developing the UK Guidance for the BS EN ISO 19650 series and the UK BIM Framework as a whole.

More information


Real estate registration and cadastre

This is a shorter version of the ebook Real Estate Registration and Cadastre as in insight paper that builds on the knowledge, understanding and wisdom found in the eBook. The eBook provides much of the basic theory, many empirical examples and a detailed annex with a literature review. This RICS insight paper focuses on the underlying understanding that led to the success of the projects in the multiple countries where the work was undertaken.


Real Estate Registration and Cadastre. Practical Lessons and Experiences  

A new e-book drafted by Gavin Adlington with contributions by Rumyana Tonchovska, FAO of the UN, Tony Lamb and Robin McLaren will be launched during the World Bank Land and Poverty Conference in March 2020. The publication is already available online as a first draft and will be made into an e-book after the conference. It will be available for free and can be used as a basis for training, taking one chapter at a time, or for a workshop lasting two or three days, or just for reading about experiences and lessons learned in other projects and programs.

The text of this book is written to be enjoyable to read in a ‘conversational’ mode to explain what we did and why, and it is interspersed with specific stories and anecdotes that actually happened and that teach good lessons and experiences from multiple countries. The audience for the book is those who would lead or be involved in such projects or programs, including senior staff in government agencies, team leaders from financing partners or bilateral donor agencies and consultants (local or international) working in the sector. The full book was presented at the FIG e-working 2021, see the proceedings here.


10 Vital Considerations for software implementation: How to ensure success of your new land administration system

By Thomson Reuters, FIG Corporate Member

The implementation of a new land administration system is no small investment for modern governments in both developed and developing countries. The operation as a whole depends on the strength of the new system and the users’ ability to wield it to its fullest potential. The risk of adopting a new system can be minimized by evaluating it against the 3S Decision-Making Framework. Ensuring that the governments’ prospective solution is secure, scalable and sustainable enables the tempering of the challenges associated with change and positions the organization for both short- and long-term successes. The publication include 10 considerations allowing modern governments to gauge the security, scalability and sustainability of the solution being evaluated.


Advances in Responsible Land Administration

Advances in Responsible Land Administration challenges conventional forms of land administration by introducing alternative approaches and provides the basis for a new land administration theory. A compilation of observations about responsible land administration in East Africa, it focuses on a new empirical foundation rather than preexisting ideals. Presenting practical knowledge resulting from real cases, it incorporates empirical studies highlighting Rwanda, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.


Valuing Unregistered Land

This report investigates the widely-discussed claim that title registration is prerequisite for valuing unregistered land. This is the first time that informal land markets in Indonesia, Ghana and Peru have been studied in this way and this research and its findings should help provide a wealth of background information to anyone working or who has an interest in this sector.


Cadastre Principles and Practice

by Roger Fisher and Jennifer Whittal

A new reference texst for the professional land surveyor and others in the property industry

Explaining the principles of cadastral law and interpretation in practice, this is the first publication of its kind in over 45 years. It is a comprehensive text for aspiring and practicing professional land surveyors, those in the real property business, and those involved in land administration. Written for the South African practice environment, it will also be of interest to an international audience.


GIM International FIG Special 2011

For the FIG Working Week, which was held from 18-22 May 2011 in Marrakech, Morocco, GIM International has created a dedicated edition. The theme of this issue is cadastre and the developments that specialists expect in the time to come: an interview with Hernando De Soto and the series of articles Beyond Cadastre 2034.

 

Land Administration for Sustainable Development

The authors: Professor Ian Williamson, Professor Stig Enemark, Land Policy Lawyer Jude Wallace  and Professional Land Surveyor and Chartered Engineer Abbas Rajabifard examine global land administration systems and outlines basic principles applicable to all countries. This book shows how to help ensure social equality, economic growth, and environmental protection through holistic land management. Professors, government officials, and students of land planning, land administrators, land planning managers will find this an invaluable resource.  

The Land Administration for Sustainable Development e-Book is available in English, Spanish, and French


The Future of Cities

UN-Habitat, Nairobi 9 May 2003

The Future of Cities is a report of a parallel event held on the occasion of the nineteenth session of the Governing Council of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). Includes presentation of Prof. Holger Magel, FIG President "About the Future of Cities".


A joint CLGE/FIG seminar on Enhancing Professional Competence

 Delft, The Netherlands, 3 November 2000 Proceedings from the first Joint CLGE/FIG seminar on Enhancing Professional Competence that was held 3 November  2000 at Delft University of Technology are now available as hard copy and on this web site. The aim of the seminar was to develop a suitable framework for the surveying profession in Europe as a basis for enhancing professional competence through the principle of mutual recognition of professional qualifications which has been established in law at the European level. This is the first joint activity to combine the efforts of FIG and CLGE (The Council of European Geodetic Surveyors). The seminar attracted some 50 participants from 17 countries representing the educational sector and the professional surveying community in the European region.

Requests for the hard copies: Gerda Schennach email: gerda.schennach[at]bev.gv.at  or FIG office, email: fig[at]fig.net 


The Mystery of Capital

Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

“The hour of capitalism’s greatest triumph,” writes Hernando de Soto, “is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis.” In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up one of the most pressing questions the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights. Every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly extralegal property arrangements, such as squatting on large estates, to a formal, unified legal property system. In the West we’ve forgotten that creating this system is what allowed people everywhere to leverage property into wealth. This persuasive book revolutionized our understanding of capital and points the way to a major transformation of the world economy.


Land Administration

Peter F. Dale and John D. MacLaughlin

This interdisciplinary work provides a high level overview of recent advances in building formal property systems throughout the world and reviews the role of property in advancing a society's economic and social agenda. It undertakes an in-depth examination of the land administration infrastructure required to support these modern property systems, giving particular attention to survey, registration, valuation, and land use control functions.

ISBN: 9780198233909


 

SDI Africa: An Implementation Guide 

The SDl Guide for Africa aims to provide a blue print for SDl implementation. Real experiences, examples, and documents are presented from African countries and other countries around the world It is meant as a ‘virtual reference kiosk' for information managers, data technicians, and technology innovators who are interested in building information infrastructure in their country. It has been compiled as a cooperative effort of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDl) and ElS-Africa , with the collaboration of the International Institute for Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation (ITG). The objective of compiling this handbook is to assist African countries to improve the management of their geo-spatial data resources in a way that effectively supports decision-making by governments and ensures the participation of the entire society in the process. Selected experts from Africa and abroad, possessing a wide knowledge and experience in advancing GI development at national, regional and international level s contributed to the various chapters of the guide. They provided their country experiences, solutions and opportunities on the different issues the handbook addresses.

For more information contact:

The Director
Development Information Services Division (DISD) Economic Commission for Africa
P.O. Box 3001
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia