Informal Development Due to Market Pressure -- A Case Study on Cyprus and the Role of Land Administration
Results of a detailed two-year research conducted by the authors are presented in this paper. It is shown that, among other reasons, informal constructions also appear in several attractive European areas due to increased market pressure. In the first part an introduction on the current state-of-the-art of informal development in Europe is presented and the findings of the research are given in brief about three Mediterranean countries: Spain, Albania, and Greece. Although the social, economic, administrative and cultural situation and the extent of informal development vary among these countries, current identified major causes for informal development are: migration in search of work and shelter, lack of affordable housing, and increased market pressure combined with inefficient land administration and/or permitting and controlling procedures. In part two of this paper, an in-depth research on Cyprus, a country which had never experienced informal development until recently, is presented. The research aims to focus especially on the risk due to increased market interest, whose economic benefits overwhelm even the long established regulatory systems for the management and administration of land. 
This original research shows that informal development is emerging in Cyprus as well. This very new phenomenon is caused by the rapid national and international market pressure in both urban and rural areas of the island. A description of the land administration tools and the procedures regulating land development is given; weaknesses of the system to meet the current needs are identified; and proposals for its improvement are offered. Relevant statistics are derived through a research on the cadastral and planning data. It is proved that recent interest in popular areas often leads to informal development.Considerations are presented concerning the importance of a continuously upgrading multipurpose and reliable land administration and regulatory system, which is vital for the security of tenure, the support of the emerging market needs, and for providing for sustainable land-uses.
From Squatter Settlement to Suburb: The Transformation of Bathore, Albania
This paper recounts the successful upgrading of Bathore, an informal settlement on government land, located in the outskirts of Tirana, the capital of Albania. Bathore was formed in the early 1990s by poor squatters, mostly from rural northern Albania, a region that became impoverished and lost most services after the fall of communism in 1990. The area that the squatters occupied lacked all infrastructure. However, the squatters built houses that were permanent structures of good quality, often multi-storey. These houses were mostly financed through the remittances of immigrants abroad. In mid-2000s, the Albanian government started taking steps to legalize squatter housing, and, subsequently, to equip the area with infrastructure. Now, Bathore is starting to resemble a middle-class-style suburb, if only in terms of physical appearance. This paper explores the roles of the central and local governments, the international financial institutions, a local NGO, and the local community in this achievement.
Strategy and Manipulation in Medieval Elections
There are many goals in developing electoral protocols, including a desire for a system which is transparent, in that it is clear what the rule or procedure to follow is; nonmanipulable, in that it is not in a person’s best interest to misrepresent their preferences; honest, in the sense that it elects the ‘right’ candidate; and not open to strategizing, i.e., bribery or collusion. However, these desiderata are in tension with each other: Often, transparent electoral procedures are the least strategy resistant, and many honest procedures encourage manipulation. Thus a balance between these different goals must be sought. In modern times, since the seminal result on vote manipulation, the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem [5, 6], much attention has been devoted to developing voting rules where manipulation is never in the best interest of the voters [4] or which are computationally too complex for the average bounded agent to be able to manipulate [1]. This focus on computational aspects of electoral methods is one of the hallmarks of modern studies on voting. But pursuit of these goals is not restricted to modern times: Those participating in elections in the Middle Ages also sought transparency, non-manipulability, honesty, and strategyproofness in so far as these properties can be consistently expressed in a single procedure. However, given the lack of computational sophistication in the Middle Ages, alternate approaches were needed in order to promote honesty, discourage strategizing, etc. These approaches can be classified as either external (constraints introduced outside of the electoral procedure, such as incentives for coming to consensus quickly) or internal (constraints introduced within the electoral procedure, such as voting rules which cannot be manipulated without adverse effects, or which are too difficult for the average bounded agent to manipulate). Surveying examples of both approaches in the context of medieval ecclesiastical and secular elections provides an interesting comparison to modern electoral procedures. Elections in the Middle Ages were used for the same reasons that they are today: To select suitable candidate(s) for a particular office, duty, or obligation. However, it is important to note that the term electio was used in the Middle Ages in a broader sense than our modern ‘election’. Its primary sense was ‘selection’ or ‘choice’, and only secondarily ‘election’ in the modern sense. Thus, many records which purportedly discuss elections are not discussing elections of the type which interests us. We can identify four categories of medieval electoral processes: (1) Election by an external authority having no direct interest in the election; (2) Indirect election, where electors name other electors who then select or elect the officials; (3) Election by lot; and (4) Election by ballot. Elections of the first and third types are generally computationally uninteresting; the first type corresponds to dictatorial voting rules, and the third type collapses to probability theory. In general, interesting voting methods are found only in the fourth type, election by ballot, though they can also occur in indirect election.