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Walter Benjamin's criticisms of dwelling and the modern interior are well known. The middle classes retreated from the alienation of nineteenth-century city life into domestic seclusion, surrounding themselves with soft furnishings in a search for comfort. In Living Rooms (2022), Sam Johnson-Schlee uses objects typically found in the living room or lounge as his starting point for the development of Benjamin's ideas. Recognising the labour invested in domestic commodities would allow us to realise our dreams of connecting with others and escaping the confines of capitalism like roots breaking out of a plant pot. The personal observations used to support the arguments reflect the experience of Generation Rent. They inform an attempt to relate IKEA's 1996 'Chuck out that chintz!' advert to crucial changes in the British housing market. The emphasis on labour largely sidelines household labour and its gendering, with the exception of the activities of 'cleanfluencer' Mrs. Hinch. The link between domestic commodities and our longing for intimacy is effectively depicted using a combination of historical research, cultural references and family stories. Plants and flowers are used throughout to illustrate specific arguments and to serve as a symbol of a different, and better, life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes to Mexico's Constitution in the 1990s marked the end of agrarian reform and the Revolutionary land regime which had allowed beneficiaries to work but not to sell their land. New legislation allowed individual parcels of ejido land to be converted into private property. Many observers link this 'privatization' with a transformation of the periurban landscape resulting from private developers' construction of mass 'social housing' developments: a classic example of neoliberal urbanism. We examine evidence for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area, finding that, although some developments do occupy former ejido land, developers mostly prefer private property, including former haciendas. Private sector interests are wary of the ejido for reasons that stem from its place in the corporatist political system that characterized twentieth‐century Mexico, and the patchwork of privatized individual parcels clashes with developers' land acquisition strategies. Ejidatarios often prefer to retain control over their land, selling plots piecemeal. Our findings demonstrate the continuing significance of urban informality—on a scale that exceeds the development of ejido land for formal housing—and the intertwining of formal and informal. We interpret these interrelated processes of housing production as legacies of corporatism, underlining the significance of political influences on Latin American neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on influence of French urban sociologists such as Christian Topalov was widely acknowledged and welcomed in Latin America. It mentions Latin American contributions to theorising from the south, they are too often pigeonholed in terms of dependency theory and translation to increase the likelihood of their speaking to a wider audience. It also mentions access to credit as a strategy to promote small businesses and combat poverty and definitive resolution of tenure.

An extensive literature opposes the provision of property titles for the residents of informal settlements. One concern is that titling leads to commodification and the market-driven displacement of the original inhabitants. Another is that it propagates the ideology of private ownership, undermines collective solidarity and demobilises social movements. This article, based on observations from Mexico City and Guadalajara, finds little evidence of displacement but highlights the importance of location. It supports the view that formalisation undermines resistance, but argues that titling does so by meeting rather than creating the desire of the urban poor for private property and homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban informality has been the subject of renewed attention in recent years, with a resurgence of interest from architecture and planning. A focus on informality has however been criticised as reviving colonial hierarchies, characterising entire cities in terms of lack and rendering them perpetually inferior to Western cities. The call to postcolonialise urban studies has been answered by an emerging literature which has neglected Latin America. This paper therefore examines recent work on urban informality in the region that resonates with other scholarship at the intersection of postcolonial and urban studies. The Latin American work is characterised by an emphasis on informality as resistance and by challenges to the formal/informal binary. Its 'favela-isation' of the continent can however perpetuate dualistic interpretations, entrenching or inverting stereotypes rather than disrupting them. The paper also asks what postcolonial readings of informality from elsewhere can contribute to understanding Latin American experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines gender and property in Guadalajara, Mexico, in the light of debates that oppose formal title to the social embeddedness of rights in customary law and assert that titling is bad for women. The article focuses on urban homes, private property, and civil law but finds that qualities regarded as characterizing customary property relations also shape popular understandings of property in urban Mexico. Discussion groups and social surveys in four low-income neighborhoods addressed two aspects of family law and property: whose name should appear on titles, and who should inherit the home. The results show that women, as wives, sisters, and daughters, have a secondary relationship to property. They also suggest that the opposition of individual title to socially embedded rights is a false dichotomy and that generalizing arguments about formalization and especially the negative gender implications of titling risks replicating the universalizing tendencies of Western property models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connections between home and the self have been the subject of debate in recent years. As a metaphor for a bounded and stable identity, the ideal of home is regarded as dangerous by theorists who oppose a politics based on nostalgic appeals to unity and privilege. Home is criticised as an exclusionary and depoliticising space. Scholars such as Iris Marion Young and Geraldine Pratt argue, however, that we should be wary of rejecting home, since the material space of home provides valuable support for individual and collective narratives of identity. In this paper I reflect on these debates in the light of my father's experience of dementia and the move from his own home into residential care. I examine alternatives to the account of identity on which critiques of home as exclusionary space are based, such as narrative identities and Jessica Benjamin's intersubjective approach to the self and the concrete other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces articles published in the January 2004 issue of the periodical "Cultural Geographies." Spatial practices and imaginations that shape cultural geographies of home on a domestic scale; Importance of gender and the family in domestic design and in everyday domestic practices; Ambiguities of a domestic modernity located within the kitchen and embodied by women.

Hernando de Soto's book The mystery of capital has renewed debate about illegality in low-income housing in Latin America, Asia and Africa. De Soto and others argue that property titles provide the poor with collateral for loans to improve their housing or set up a business. Critics argue that incorporation into the formal market will displace the original inhabitants. In this article I analyse these debates about legalization as expressions of the dualisms that have shaped western thought. The relation between legal and illegal can be understood as a variant of the public/private dichotomy. Challenging the opposition of legal to illegal, I argue that the difference between them is not as great as the proponents of legalization assume. This questions the efficacy of legalization as an engine of change. In Mexico, the beneficiaries of legalization have little interest in formal credit, preferring loans from friends or relatives, and legalization does not lead to displacement. The failure of theories about legalization to predict the outcome is a product of their reliance on dualistic thinking and of the exclusion of the private from their accounts of the process [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the relationship between ageing and masculinity in urban Mexico. Disadvantages of hegemonic masculinities in older men; Association of masculinity with the provider role; Reasons for the rejection of older men by their families; Need for diversification of men's role in the family.

This article asks how family relationships affect the living conditions of low-income elderly people in urban Mexico. There is little State provision of accommodation for the elderly, forcing older people to rely on their families for care. Yet many poorer families cannot afford to provide care, and some are unwilling to do so. In addition, families treat elderly men and women differently, with significant consequences for women's and men's housing conditions and wellbeing in later life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assesses an alternative model for land regularization in Guadalajara, Mexico. Tenure legislation programmes; Consequences of illegal settlement for municipal government; Cost-effectiveness of the model.

Many poor families in third world cities live in their own self-help homes and the relative number of such households has risen dramatically through time. If there were relatively few families living in self-help housing in 1940, in many cities the majority lives in such accommodation today. There are, however, important exceptions. In numerous African and Asian cities tenants and sharers constitute a large majority and in Latin America between one-third and one-half of the populations of Bogotá in Columbia, Caracas in Venezuela, Guadalajara in Mexico, La Paz in Bolivia, Lima in Peru and São Paulo in Brazil live in rental accommodation. After years of neglect, housing research is gradually rediscovering the previously invisible tenants and sharers. The paper examines various questions related to tenants and rental accommodation on the basis of research carried out in two large Mexican cities, Guadalajara and Puebla. It examines the family and income differences between owners and tenants on the basis of survey data conducted in three settlements in each city. It considers whether ownership is the declared preference of the interviewed families and it examines the residential trajectories of tenants and owners.

Focuses on the conservation policies for historical centers in Latin America. Contributions of conservation policies to urban development; Necessity of re-assessing the contest for space in the city center; Development and renovation of the city of Puebla, Mexico; Actions and discourses of the Union Popular de Vendedores Ambulantes de Octubre, a group representing the majority of ambulantes.