Reimagining (informal) housing futures in uncertain times

Abstract

In an incisive piece in this Journal, Michele Lancione argues that the only way to envision new housing futures is to pay attention to places where housing precarity is lived and felt. We respond to such a discursive call by drawing on a wide-range of particular empirics—from our pedagogical engagement with housing informality in Melbourne to in-situ ethnographic empirical work in Manila and Dhaka—to elaborate three aspects of reimagining informal housing practices: a) informal housing as a site for grounding teaching and learning pedagogy; b) informal housing as a space for reflexive research; and c) informal housing as a mode of futuring. Our reflective insights, which put three cities with vastly different socio-political histories in conversation, also answer a growing call from critical urban scholars to abandon the usual comparison of similar cities and to overcome the division between global North and global South cities, offering ideas that stress mutual learning across this divide.