Do we need innovation in housing policy? Mass production, community-based upgrading, and the politics of urban land in the Global South (original) (raw)
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Environment & Urbanization, 2020
Incremental housing drives urbanization worldwide, and is recognized as the basis for socially relevant solutions to housing shortages in the global South. However, scholarship on incremental housing continues to focus largely on tenure, building materials and housing conditions at a local level, while incremental housing is embedded in – and dependent on – larger urban and regional systems and flows. We argue that a further reconceptualization of incremental housing is needed that acknowledges the embeddedness of local incremental building practices within broader industries, markets and practices of city-making. Starting from this observation, we suggest an extended framework for understanding the city-wide industries and flows around incremental housing, in relation to five dimensions: 1) land, 2) finance, 3) infrastructure, 4) building materials and 5) labour. Mapping these dynamics is necessary to understand fundamental questions of where, how and why initiatives aimed at improving or developing incremental housing advance or get stuck.
Housing policy issues in contemporary South America: an introduction
International Journal of Housing Policy
In the introduction to this special issue on Latin American housing policies, we address the common elements evident in this collection of papers with the aim of enabling a better knowledge exchange between the 'global North' and the 'global South' on potentially common issues. These include the changing relationship between state and capital, with special emphasis on the new role adopted by the State as a facilitator for financial private capital in an increasingly privatised housing sector; the need to address precarious housing conditions among vast sectors of the population, including international migrants; and the various innovative roles played by civil society in housing provision. Notwithstanding these similarities between world regions, our editorial introduction highlights a number of particularities in housing research in the Latin American region, underscoring the need to reflect critically on the applicability of concepts and models created in different geographical contexts with different historical, social and political realities. Within this editorial, we also introduce the main themes discussed in the specific articles and attempt to place them within the more general scope of earlier research on housing policies in the region. We conclude by acknowledging that a solution to long lasting housing inequality in Latin America remains an unfulfilled promise.
Refocusing the housing debate in developing countries from a pluralist perspective
Habitat International, 2001
The debate on housing policy in developing countries since the late 1980s has been dominated by the World Bank led strategy of developing the housing sector as a whole by enabling primarily formal private markets to work more e$ciently. Yet, the emphasis on private markets has led to the exclusion of complementary and alternative public, co-operative/community based and informal modes of housing provision from serious policy consideration. This paper argues for the adoption of a more integrated housing policy that is based on the recognition and better co-ordination of plurality of provision. Thereby, not only allowing further development of speci"c modes in appropriate socio-economic settings but also enabling the creation of synergies through combining complementary modes in order to overcome their relative weaknesses, we can boost supply to speci"c target groups.
Modes of housing provision in developing countries
Progress in Planning - PROG PLANN, 2001
In the face of an estimated one billion people living in inadequate housing conditions in developing countries the need for scaling up housing supply has become an urgent focus of policy debate. To this end the expansion of the role of the private markets has formed the central thesis of the ‘enabling strategy’ for developing the housing sector as a whole rather than relying on project based approaches such as sites and services and settlement upgrading programmes. Policy recommendations emanating from such a standpoint concentrate on adjustments to supply and demand through deregulation and institutional development of the land and housing markets in developing countries in order to overcome largely external constraints to a more efficient market mechanism. This conception of the enabling strategy, however, has been subject to much debate and criticism for its over-concentration on the private markets and exclusion of alternative/complementary modes of housing provision from seriou...
The paper discusses: the evolution of the housing sector and the resulting housing conditions in Latin America in the last 50 years; the government policies that affected its performance; and the resulting urban impacts. Housing conditions improved due to a reduction in poverty and the effects of public housing policies that provided housing to a large section of the population that was otherwise unable to solve their housing problems in the formal housing sector. Governments used two approaches: supply-side policies including direct provision and demand-side policies including reforms aiming to improve the functioning of formal housing market. Several countries used both at different points in time and often in parallel. A constant in the region has been the lack of coordination with urban development policies and regulations. Large housing programs were implemented with little investment in transportation and urban services and amenities. The housing policies contributed to widespread urban sprawl without mitigating the subsequent urban problems: rapid consumption of valuable agricultural land, the need to extending urban infrastructure and services, and decreasing access to employment and service centers for the population of the new residential areas. This paper advocates that housing policies in LAC must be reformed to incorporate an urban-based approach focusing on the integrated improvement of living conditions for urban populations rather than on building more houses. Adoption of these recommendations can turn the housing sector and its related public policies into an effective instrument for building better cities.