International Cooperation Land Management Chair

The Land Management Chair has an international orientation, both through collaborative work with international partners worldwide, and through international visiting researchers, Doctoral, Master and Bachelor students. Goal of the international cooperation is to exchange and learn from international experiences; compare how local contexts influences land management practice and legislation; develop new solutions, tools, regulations and insights in international land management problems; and, test and develop prototypes of new information-based systems and technologies. This should culminate into more responsible and smarter international land management.

Currently the Chair is active in the following locations:

Africa

  • Africa-Wide: ADLAND Project (Advancing collaborative research in responsible and smart land management in and for Africa). This project aims to advance the concept and praxis of responsible and smart land management, in the context of, and for the purpose of, being able to address the African land policy needs. The advancement will take place through the networking of African and European Land Management research centers, implemented through a set of practical collaborative research and development activities.
  • Ethiopia: In the context of ADLAND project, the Chair is co-organising a conference on Land Government and research development workshop in Bahir Dar, together with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the World Bank. In addition, the Chair provides a PhD course each year on land policy and land governance, and two PhD students from the Bahir Dar University are supervised. More information about activities in Ethiopia please see here.
  • Ghana: The Chair has established a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana. At KNUST the Chair has organised a refresher course on smart and responsible land management in 2017, and research development course in 2018. KNUST is also part of the ADLAND consortium and one of the key partners of TUM.Africa. In 2017, TUM Chair of Land Management held an alumni refresher course for the former students of the TUM MSc Land Management Program from Africa, in collaboration with the KNUST. In 2018, the TUM Chair of Land Management (together with its ADLAND consortium), conducted two workshops at the KNUST – a Research Development Workshop and a Training Course on land Consolidation). For more information please see here. Three research visitors from KNUST / Ghana visit the Chair.
  • Kenya: The BoLe Chair is involved in student fieldwork in Kenya. As part of the cooperative research project on the quality network Kenya Biodiversity, which is funded by the DAAD, the TUM sent in March 2017 and March / April 2018 a few students for further data acquisition and research to Kilifi in Kenya. Goal was to collect data on land use and property rights in the study area. In close cooperation with the DAAD-funded research project on the Quality Network Biodiversity in Kenya another research project funded by GLTN (UN Habitat) was funded in 2018. The aim was to support and carry out four Master theses in the summer of 2018. Within the theses major topics of land management and property rights in the study area around Taita Hills, Kenya is analyzed. For this purpose, a total of two master students from Kenya and two TUM students are financially supported in their data acquisition in August 2018. As the study coincides with the third annual phase of the DAAD Quality Network on Biodiversity, further students and staff members from the chair will collect additional data and land tenure in the area of Taita Hills, Kenya.
  • Namibia: The Namibia University of Science and Technology is one of the ADLAND partners, where a curricula study and a research writing workshop take place.
  • Nigeria: Two PhD students from Nigeria are currently affiliated with the Chair. Ms. Ebele Maduekwe is studying the issues of human recognition as a facet of empowerment and rural development for women in agriculture. Mr. Agboeze Anthony Ikechukwu is currently working on the topic of designing and implementing tools for visualising competing interests in land in Enugu, Nigeria. TUM Chair of land Management has also had collaborative research that led to joint publication with the Department of Estate of Management of the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
  • Rwanda: The collaboration in Rwanda concerns a collaboration with both the Institut d’Enseignement Supérieur de Ruhengeri (INES), in Ruhengeri/Musanze, Rwanda, and the University of Rwanda in Kigali, Rwanda. INES is an ADLAND partner, and has been host of several courses on smart and responsible land management. In addition, collaborative research projects are being developed with INES. The PhD student Ernest Uwayezu personifies the collaboration with the GIS Centre of the University of Rwanda in Kigali. His research is on spatial justice and land tenure security in Kigali.
  • Tanzania: In Tanzania the Chair is collaborating with the Ardhi University (ARU), Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania (through the ADLAND project) in the field of land management and the Institute of rural development planning (IRDP) in Dodoma for rural development. For more information please click here.

Europe

  • Croatia: In Croatia the Chair collaborates with the University of Zagreb, organising the yearly IDS3Geo (International Doctoral Seminar on Geodesy Geoinformatics And Geospace) - science.geof.unizg.hr/ids2018/ - workshops for PhD students and postdoc researchers. Please also see 2017 and 2018.
  • Poland: The TUFF holder, Magdalena Wagner, works on bringing together operational research and spatial planning by developing an algorithm to assist decision-making processes related to city policy making. In addition, the Chair is in close contact with the Lublin University of Technology and the Agricultural University of Krakow. More information about our contacts with Lublin University. Please see here.
  • Eastern and Western Europe: State of Play Land consolidation in Europe:
    • Comparative research on land consolidation practices (UNECE/WPLA).
    • Comparative research on land consolidation implementation (Bachelor studies).
  • Geodätisches Kolloquium Innsbruck, Austria, June 21, 2017 (please see here).

 

Asia

  • Indonesia: The Land Management Chair has signed a MoU with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the Diponegoro University (Universitas Diponegoro – UNDIP) Semarang. The MoU foresees various collaboration activities, including student and staff exchange, connection and mutual recognition of the International Master program in Land Management and Land Tenure / Geospatial Science at TUM and the Master Program in Regional and Urban Development at UNDIP.
  • China: There are several collaborative projects with China. These include:
    • RENMIN University, Beijing. The Land Management Chair been collaborating with the Renmin University in Beijing in various ways: through (joint) summer courses (details please see here), collaborative article writing and staff/student exchange.
    • Zhejiang University. The cooperation with Zhejiang University has developed gradually with the long-term visits of PhD and post-doc researchers Mengjing Wang (more information about her research see here), Guangyu Li and Xiaobin Zhang. Through these visits a number of joint peer-reviewed articles were prepared. In addition, Prof. de Vries has contributed to two conferences organised by Zhejiang University.
    • The PhD work of Ms. Ying Lu focuses on rural development changes, possibilities, challenges and opportunities in China.
  • South Korea: The PhD work of Mr. Cheonjae Lee aims at describing and understanding land governance changes in large-scale State transformations, such as unifications of countries, with a particular emphasis on South Korea and it possible unification with North Korea.
  • Philippines: The PhD student Florentino Morales, from partner institute University of Visdayas, works on a GIS-Based Decision Support System (Dss) For Land Use Planning as A Tool for Disaster Risk Reduction in Baybay City, Philippines.

Nepal: The Chair of Land Management is conducting the research project “The effects of integrated land and water management on the environment and cultural identity for Bagmati River in Kathmandu, Nepal” in collaboration with Kathmandu University and the Ministry of Financial Affairs and Planning, and carried out by interns Lisa-Maria Gigl and Maximilian Kreutzer from the MSc Environmental Planning and Ecological Engineering, who intend to write their master’s theses on the topic.

 

Latin America

  • Mexico: A close cooperation exists with the Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP) and Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Puebla. In 2017 the Chair jointly organised the workshops ”The green belt as memory of the rural landscape” in Cholula, Mexico and “The river and the memory” in Munich. Moreover, the project ‘Resilience Beyond Emergency: Assessing Risk Management’ is addressing the evaluation and assessment of emergency responses, urban reconstruction, local governance, land management, water supply, health, and food security and strategic planning, making use of our tools and instruments as Land Managers, Architects and Urban Planners, focusing on the case study of Tochimilco, severely damaged due to the earthquakes of 2017. The project consists of a series of activities taking place during 2018, such as: a cartographic update making use of TUM-PREP resources (see USA), a workshop to train the team in Mexico in the use of GIS conducted by PhD student Ernest Uwayezu from Rwanda, a design workshop based on the 100 Resilient Cities by the Rockefeller Foundation to trace intervention strategies (both financed by BMBF Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung), a Kleine Alumni Seminar (KAS) financed by Deutsche Akademie Austauschdienst (DAAD), an open forum with the different stakeholders, an itinerant exhibition of the projects in Biblioteca Franciscana de Puebla (Mexico), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain), Deutsches Museum and TUM (Germany), and a Master’s thesis on “The role of good governance in environmental risk management” by the student Dirk Baldenhofer of the Master’s Programme Land Management and Land Tenure.

North America

  • USA: University of Wisconsin. A first connection has been made through the TUM-PREP (Practical Research Experience Program). Jonathan Whatley from the University of Wisconsin is conducting a study at the Chair, which consists of updating the cartography of Tochimilco, linked with the project “Resilience beyond emergency”. This task involves the coordination of drone flights in collaboration with Universidad de las Américas Puebla, geo-referencing the captured images, coordination of land use surveys, and mapping the case study –with special emphasis on the water infrastructures- at a plot level.