Housing Informality Research Articles

Can Land Use Regulation Be Smarter? Planners’ Role in the Informal Housing Challenge

Persistent urbanization is challenging planners to reimagine the absorptive capacities of cities. While more and more city dwellers respond to the challenge with informal solutions, policy and planning responses have fallen short of providing compelling answers. We propose redirecting attention to the use of land. This paper develops a model that centers on the role of land use regulation in conditioning and sustaining housing informality. Taking variations in income, location, and regulation into account, our framework uncovers the effective, household-level regulatory burden. Using this model to audit existing land use regimes gives planners the tools to plan effectively for targeted adjustments.

Housing Affordability, Government Intervention and Housing Informality: An African Dilemma?

The imperfections associated with housing markets have often been the basis for government intervention policies. The purpose of this article is to show the need for governmental responsiveness regarding local realities in structuring policies in specific sectors of the housing market. It shows how government intervention contributes to housing supply and the consequences of this in developed and developing countries. Conversely, it also explores how government intervention in co-operative societies has been utilised in various countries to address housing supply inelasticity, the outcome of this, and lessons that can be learnt. This study takes the form of a literature review and a quantitative survey of co-operative societies in Lagos, Nigeria. Its analysis is based on multivariate techniques. The quantitative survey is utilised to show a specific case of government inactivity in the co-operative housing sector, while the literature review is utilised to showcase government intervention in co-operative housing in four countries. The study argues that while government interventions (by way of planning regulations) often leads to house-price increases and unaffordability in developed countries, it has contributed to the emergence of informal settlements in several African cities.Additionally, while co-operative societies have been historically recognised to reduce inelasticity, improve supply and affordability in developed countries, they have yet to be recognised and supported in African cities like Lagos. It is concluded that while housing affordability is a dilemma that faces both developed and African countries, informality arises as a uniquely developing country response to unaffordability. It is recommended that, learning from history, African governments should recognise and integrate co-operative societies into their housing supply system. Furthermore, governments should implement appropriate policies to guide their activities towards reducing supply inelasticity, increasing affordability and the reduction of ever-expanding informal communities.

Regulations and housing informality in African cities: appropriating regulatory frameworks to factors that influence resilience

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the regulatory factors that constrain housing in African cities evinced in the growing informal housing delivery system that characterize them. This is intended to draw lessons for appropriating regulations to various house developer needs. The research uses a case study approach involving two informal settlements in Lusaka City, Zambia. Data collection methods included both physical observations and interviews with informal settlement dwellers. The paper indicates regulatory frameworks which shape the general context of housing development, generate high land access problems and transaction costs, and impact cultural aspects which influence the manner in which people respond to situations and opportunities when making decisions about housing. This contrasts with the informal system which offers developers the freedom to use alternative construction methods offering affordable means of house production. The informal setting also offers people freedom to construct houses according to individual preferences enabling people to “live their dreams” made possible by the relaxation in rules and regulations. This helps in filling the gap created by the demand and supply mismatch in the formal areas. To motivate regulatory compliance, this paper establishes an adaptive regulatory approach that balances social-cultural building practices and land delivery methods.

Rental housing and the urban poor: understanding the growth and production of rental housing in Brazilian favelas

Rental housing is increasingly becoming the key shelter option for the poor living in and moving into cities, including those living in informal settlements. The paper revisits the production of rental housing in informal settlements within the new contours of a neo-liberalism with stronger social agendas in Latin America drawing on the case of landlords in Brazilian favelas. The contributions of the paper are twofold: first, it explores the different elements impacting the development of rental housing in informal settlements in Brazil, from the socio-economic to the political, from the state to the intra-settlement dynamics; and second, it assesses how these conditions determine the way landlords operate and produce rental housing. The analyses add to our understanding of the contemporary forms of housing informality reproduction in emerging economies and how individuals pervade the circuits of market and survival constructing their livelihoods on the basis of the economic and social resources from renting.

Land Subdivision Legislation in Brazil - Guilty of Promoting Insecure Housing Tenure?

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 The Brazilian federal legislation on land subdivision approved in 1979 and its local implementation by municipalities contributed to increase housing informality from 1980 to 2000, a period of marked changes in the economic, demographic, and social scenarios. Econometric analysis of a cross-sectional and time-series panel of censuses data regarding insecure housing tenure suggests that regulations on land subdivision played an important role in the growth of housing informality in Brazil, regardless demographic and economic factors. This was most noticeable when local ordinances overregulated land subdivision parameters. We argue that stricter and more demanding requirements for approval and registration of land developments increased costs and risks for subdividing land formally within a scenario of economic downturn. This constrained formal land supply elasticity for the low-income housing demand which probably forced developers into informality to eliminate the costs and red tape involved in developing land formally.

Housing informality in Buenos Aires: Past, present and future?

As in most other Latin American cities, a principal way of accessing housing for the urban poor in Buenos Aires has been through the illegal occupation of land. Over a period of roughly eight decades, this has led to the formation of hundreds of informal settlements in the city. This article traces the historical development of informality in Argentina’s capital. It shows that different phases in this development, each with particular characteristics, can be discerned. Currently, the contours of a new phase, different from all previous ones, are taking shape. It will be argued that without an adequate understanding of the different conditioning factors of this new phase and an integrated approach to address them, informality in the city is bound to persist and even to increase in size, in spite of the country’s impressive recent economic growth and high government expenditure on social housing.

Paradoxes of Urban Housing Informality in the Developing World

This article addresses a series of paradoxes regarding informal settlements in cities in the developing world and their relation with the legal system. The first paradox regards the penalization of illegal land occupations on the one hand versus the legalization of that same practice on the other. Second, it looks at the relationship between land occupations as systematic violations of property rights, but with the goal of forming new property rights and thus paradoxically supporting private property as a substantive principle. Third, the reasoning behind the fact that the same system that denies legal access to housing for poor sectors simultaneously attempts to incorporate informal settlements in an ad hoc manner through legalization schemes is examined. It is shown that there is a logic to these paradoxes, which, although contradictory from standard legal perspectives, can be accommodated within a theoretical framework that distinguishes an internal normative order operating within informal settlements, from the state legal system, operative outside it. The proposed framework not only settles the paradoxes, but, this article concludes, can also guide attempts to deal with the enormous anticipated growth of informality in the developing world.

“We Are Not Marginals”

The expanding squatter settlements of Latin America’s cities are emblematic of the new forms of spatial inequality and social suffering wrought by the neoliberal order. In the context of the return of the “dangerous classes” across the Americas, the dominant classes have mobilized the culture-of-poverty and marginality myths of the 1960s as a means of governance by placing responsibility for the “pathologies” of poverty on a criminalized urban underclass. Analysis of the debates regarding the meanings of Uruguay’s new urban poor in relation to a lead-poisoning epidemic in Montevideo links the growth of economic and housing informality to social exclusion and marginality, and reveals the efforts of those in power to shift responsibility for lead poisoning onto its victims. It also identifies various responses of squatters to hegemonic forms of culturalism and othering, including the displacing of culturalist discourses onto similar “others,” “strategic othering” emphasizing their structural vulnerability to urban environmental hazards, and the use of their status as lead victims to assert their humanity and rights.La expansión de asentamientos ocupados en las ciudades de América Latina es emblemático de las nuevas formas de desigualdad espacial y sufrimiento social labrado por el orden neoliberal. En el contexto del retorno de “las clases peligrosas” a través de las Américas, las clases dominantes han movilizado los mitos de la cultura de pobreza y marginalidad de los 1960 como medio de gobernación, colocando la responsabilidad de las “patologías” de la pobreza en una subclase de criminalidad urbana. Un análisis de los debates en torno al significado de los nuevos pobres urbanos de Uruguay, relacionado con un caso de una epidemia de contaminación de plomo en Montevideo, vincula el crecimiento de economía y vivienda informal con la exclusión social y marginalidad y revela los esfuerzos de los que están en el poder de desplazar la responsabilidad del envenenamiento con plomo a sus victimas. Así mismo, identifica varias respuestas de los ocupantes a las formas hegemónicas de culturalismo y el hacer de “otro,” incluyendo el desplazamiento del discurso culturalista encima de similares “otros” hacer de “otro estratégicamente,” poniéndole énfasis a su vulnerabilidad estructural a los peligros del medio ambiente urbano, y el uso de su estatus como victimas del plomo para acertar su humanidad y sus derechos.

Building bridges with the grassroots: housing formalization process in Egyptian cities

In the last few years, Egypt’s emerging legitimization of informal markets has played a critical role in the ongoing economic reforms and poverty alleviation strategies. This paper aims to elucidate the mechanism and complexity of housing informality in Egypt’s secondary cities, to contribute to the understanding of participatory planning and to offer local officials and urban professionals insight into how they could integrate informal housing development in the urban fabric. The opportunities created by the government initiative to prepare a General Strategic Urban Plan (GSUP) for secondary cities in collaboration with UN-HABITAT are highlighted. Specifically, the paper aims to contribute to the GSUP by presenting a case study of one of its phases, that of action plan elaboration. The case study concerns an informal settlement located in a peripheral (rural) area seeking to formalize land titles. Understanding the built environment of informal housing developments would enable the state and housing professionals to encompass, eliminate, and integrate informal housing areas within formal areas in Egyptian cities. It concludes that the role of the government should be changed from that of provider or facilitator or enabler into that of an agent of cost recovery.

Are Uruguayan Housing Policies Reaching the Poor? An Assessment of Housing Deficit, Housing Informality and Usage of Housing Programs in Uruguay

This document surveys the Uruguayan housing market, first describing the main housing programs and policies, then comparing their design with households' characteristics and needs. The document additionally measures Uruguay's housing deficit, using the basis deficit as well as quantitative and qualitative deficits, and provides a definition of housing informality that captures most irregular housing situations, thus delineating the size and attributes of the informal housing market. Considering both the housing deficit and informality permits an understanding of which population segments have the most urgent housing needs and whether they are currently eligible for participation in housing programs. Finally, the study considers how many households eligible for housing programs actually make use of them.

Rethinking urban informality and the planning process in Egypt

The question of urban informality today concerns the majority of the inhabitants and policy makers of regional metropolises and secondary cities. The first aim of this article is to show that there are diverse mechanisms behind the complexity of urban housing informality in Egyptian cities. It explores the process of an Action Plan and it improves the understanding of the implementation process within informal housing areas. Secondly, it shows how the conditions of informal housing can be formulated at the local level with 'technical enablement', enabling governance of informal housing that facilitates cooperation among various actors. Understanding the built environment of informal housing developments would enable state and housing professionals to accumulate, eliminate, and integrate informal housing areas within formal planning zones, and the value of informal properties should be harnessed to promote development and alleviate poverty. It concludes that the role of the government should be changed from provider or facilitator into enabler.