A/HRC/22/46 23. Security of tenure is understood in the present report as tenure of land and/or housing which ensures a secure home and enables one to live in security, peace and dignity. While the report does not address land tenure other than as prerequisite for housing, it must be noted that issues pertaining to land—whether for housing or agriculture—are intimately linked. B. Existing tenure systems and categories 24. Land tenure systems and forms determine who can use and dispose of what land, housing or natural resources for how long and under what conditions. Attempts have been made to classify forms and systems of tenure in order to clarify existing arrangements. 25. First, it has been suggested that all categories of tenure exist within a number of primary tenure systems, namely: (a) statutory systems, established by law or statutes—they consist of two main types, private and public tenure systems, and can guarantee individual or collective rights; (b) customary systems, referring to the communal possession of rights to use and allocate land by a group sharing the same cultural identity or established by customs; (c) religious systems, whereby all or some land is owned and managed by religious authorities; and (d) informal tenure systems, most common in urban areas—these are often hybrid systems that have emerged in response to the difficulties of existing systems to cater for rapidly expanding cities and their urban land markets. 16 26. Within each of these primary tenure systems, a number of tenure categories or forms exist. Several tenure categories may also co-exist on the same plot, a situation frequent in urban settlements. Some of the main categories include: individual freehold (ownership in perpetuity); delayed freehold (conditional ownership); registered leasehold (ownership for a specified period, from a few months to 999 years); public rental (rental occupation of publicly owned land or housing); private rental (rental of privately owned property); collective or communal ownership, including cooperative (ownership is vested in the cooperative or group of which residents are co-owners); community land trust (a non-profit organization develops and stewards affordable housing on behalf of a community); and customary ownership or use.17 27. These broad distinctions are used to clarify the nature of tenure, yet in most cases they simplify and do not fully reflect the complexity of situations on the ground. In many cases legal plurality exists, such as when statutory tenure categories are superimposed upon customary regimes. It might thus be useful to understand the issue as one of a spectrum of tenure arrangements and forms, with marked variations depending on context. Understanding “informal settlements” C. 28. The above distinctions have particularly obvious limitations when attempting to capture and reflect the diversity of arrangements in informal tenure systems, or in what is commonly termed ―informal settlements‖. 29. Informal settlements are self-made, spontaneous, self-managed and unplanned settlement and housing arrangements, initiated by urban poor themselves. They are generally characterized by precarious infrastructure and housing conditions. The term 16 17 See Geoffrey Payne and Alain Durand-Lasserve, ―Holding on: security of tenure—types, policies, practices and challenges‖, available from www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Housing/Pages/StudyOnSecurityOfTenure.aspx. Ibid. 7