A legal title of effective land tenure for inhabitants will encourage them to improve their dwellings. Minimum access requirements have to be assured, by constructing either pedestrian ways or compacted soil roads. Roads are essential for vehicular traffic in case of emergency and to facilitate the future construction of other basic infrastructure. The construction of such infrastructure would be undertaken when the inhabitants have the means and willingness to share the construction expenses and sustain the maintenance costs. Urban planning, in the case of informal settlements, does not involve large development projects, but aims to improve living conditions in these settlements with minimum intervention.

Participatory Planning
The planning objective is to ensure a sustainable growth related to the limited resources that the inhabitants are ready to mobilise and those that are available in the municipality. It is a didactical approach aimed at demanding responsibility from administrators for a sustainable development strategy and, in the meantime, enabling local technicians to use simple control tools (for example, the management of a simple register). At the operational level, it aims for the definition of priority actions based on a simple plan, which can also be used to facilitate the process of land tenure titling. If such a plan is prepared exclusively by foreign advisers or by bureaucracy without the active participation of beneficiary inhabitants, it will be implemented with difficulties. An almost general absence of intervention or control by municipal authorities can be observed in the process of growth of informal settlements. The implementation of regulatory provisions of a plan should
always be followed by concrete action – signifying a new willingness in urban development with public intervention – such as providing infrastructure with minimum cost and/or the contextual launch of a process of effective tit-ling for the inhabitants.

Land Administration
In Mozambique, land is government property and it cannot be sold or, in any other way, acquired by the user, mortgaged or used as lien, but the ‘Right of Land Use and Exploitation’ can be transmitted by inheritance. This right can be acquired through occupation by persons and by local communities, accor-ding to the norms and customary practices, or by persons with good faith who have been using the land for at least ten years.
The constitution, modification, transmission and extinction of the right of land use and exploitation are liable to registration. However, the absence of registration does not affect the right of land use and exploitation acquired by occupation. The title has to be given by the Cadastre Public Services, general or urban. At some stage in the process, the Cadastral Services will notify the applicant of the necessity to perform a demarcation.
The data collected during the mapping process are name, location of the plot, the surrounding elements of the plot, type of exploitation, members of the family, construction descriptions, living conditions, topographic scheme, names of witnesses and also the technician who is responsible for the registration. This registration contributes to better management of the city:

• it documents the physical situation of the urban occupation, facilitating in this way the planning of actions that aim for the improvement and expansion of basic services, such as roads, drainage or piped water
  
• it permits regulation of the actual occupation, and the institutions recognise the existence of the occupation
  
• it supports taxation, providing the budget for further improvements.

• Trindade, C.T.G., ‘Upgrading and land titling in informal settlements - Manica City, The great importance of the PSM true colour quickbird satellite image as a cartographic document, Manica Province, Central Region – Mozambique’, see also: www.fig.net.