Evaluación social de políticas y programas de vivienda: Un análisis de la contribución de la vivienda a la reducción de la pobreza urbana

Abstract

The paper seeks to establish qualitative criteria for the social assessment of contemporary housing policies in developing countries. It starts from three premises: that urban poverty eradication is today a most urgent task promoted by the international community; that while public housing practices, specially through nonconventional policies, have made valuable contributions to poverty eradication in the past 30 years, the results have not been fully satisfactory, due mainly to a narrow conceptualisation of poverty; and that the emergence of a new qualitative paradigm of poverty opens the way for more adequate policies. The paper examines the housing practices and the content of the new paradigm, identifying four main attributes of the poverty condition: multidimensionality, heterogeneity, participation and integration, to which it is added another one resulting from the criticisms to this approach. Further analyses of these attributes, trying to define them in the context of urban processes, produce eight criteria which are then applied to three urban poverty alleviation programmes in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The purpose of this application is twofold: to test the efficiency of the qualitative instruments and the consistency of the programmes. Within realistic limits, the results are positive on both accounts.