In considering the legal status of residents in popular settlements of third world cities, the term 'squatter', with its denotation of unequivocal illegality, must be discarded in favour of categorizations which more faithfully reflect the specific legal and social conditions of the settlement being considered. The case of land rights in Jakarta is used to illustrate this general point. Here three broad categorizations of rights are used in the markets for residential lands: fully legal registered rights, legal but unregistered rights (girik rights) and unregistered 'quasilegal' rights (garapan rights). An analysis of the historical development of these categories, from the explicit legal dualism of the Dutch colonial period to the implicit dualism seen today, demonstrates the relevance of colonial legal structures to the analysis of current conditions of urban development.
