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Mexico's housing policies and institutions have focused on increasing the housing supply over the past 50 years. Despite this, most of the population has been unable to afford it and has been forced to fend for themselves through self-construction in socially produced neighborhoods. This research compares the difference between inhabiting a "turn-key" house provided by the state and a self-constructed house through the lens of appropriation and its effects on identity and place attachment that evidence the co-constitutive nature of the house/resident dynamic. As case studies, thirty houses were analyzed in six neighborhoods, three state-financed and three socially produced. The empirical data collected through the qualitative study was structured through the development of a theoretical model called "dwelling by appropriation" that attempts to describe the practices surrounding the appropriation of the home. The research found that individuals who construct their own homes are prouder of them, more satisfied with them, have a higher sense of self-esteem and self-efficacy, and are more trusting of their neighbors as they are in control of critical decisions regarding their living environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how two different, but related processes converge in the Ciudad Kennedy neighbourhood, built by the Instituto de Credito Territorial (ICT) on the outskirts of Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, at the beginning of the 1960s. The ICT, the Colombian state agency responsible for building low-income housing, sought various means of addressing a housing crisis that had been exacerbated since the 1950s by significant rural migration into the country's urban centres. In this context, the ICT collaborated closely with the Inter-American Housing and Planning Center (CINVA). In tandem, the U.S. government approved budgeting for the programme Alliance for Progress. This programme for foreign aid and regional cooperation cemented the U.S. effort to consolidate its influence in Latin America as part of its Cold War geostrategy. Housing being one of the Alliance's primary means of achieving its goals, Ciudad Kennedy represented the measure by which the success of American foreign policy in Latin America could be assessed. By considering housing produced by the ICT in Colombia as a geopolitical tool in the 1960s, Ciudad Kennedy illustrates how the U.S. enhanced its relationships with Latin America through U.S. technicians and foreign aid programmes, such as the Alliance for Progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal settlement is a spatial manifestation of inequality, in that people turn to informal solutions for housing when formal ones are out of reach, usually because of financial constraints but also other factors such as social exclusion. However very little is known about the architectural and urban forms that constitute informal settlements, and thus how this inequality manifests spatially, and what specifically is inadequate in these settlements is not currently well understood. We use the framework of the United Nations Right to Adequate Housing as a benchmark to determine whether housing is contributing to inequality through one or more failures of adequacy, in which case we define these as being inequitable housing. We analyse the architecture of four cases within three informal settlements in Ahmedabad, Gujarat state, India, to examine how these urban forms both reflect and/or remedy multi-scalar urban housing inequalities. Four key physical spaces are found to be important: the dwelling's site, resident's control over dwelling design and construction, the design of the dwelling threshold, and the characteristics of shared open spaces. In the right combination, the quality of these physical spaces in informal settlements can contribute to informal settlement residents achieving housing adequacy. A better understanding of the built environment of informal settlements can enable designers and planners to harness the potential of informal settlement environments that are assets of the urban poor, create a context that stops informal settlements becoming 'slum-like' and help construct pathways towards urban equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Privately organized collective housing is currently included in agendas for sustainable urban development in a range of European cities as a resource-efficient form of housing that prevents isolation and contributes to social cohesion within urban communities. However, research has shown that the recent surge of different forms of private-collective housing in Berlin could be a driver of gentrification and segregation. This article aims to uncover potential causes of the discrepancies between the ideological, and at times utopian, motivations underpinning self-build housing projects in the former East Berlin district Prenzlauer Berg, and their actual outcomes. I do so by analysing the literary (counter) discourse on self-build groups developed in Anke Stelling's novels Bodentiefe Fenster [ Floor-Length Windows ] (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018, published in English translation as Higher Ground in 2021). I show that the realization of socially progressive, or even utopian, plans for urban private-collective housing prove difficult, and sometimes impossible, for the characters in the novels, due to the influence of other societal structures such as gender and class inequalities, urban segregation and gentrification, discrimination and the neoliberal logic of individual competition and consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Szociológiai Szemle is the property of Hungarian Sociological Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In South Africa, the state provides low-income housing through subsidies to construct starter homes; however, the effort is insufficient to meet the country's housing demand. Another form of public or subsidised housing provision is the self-help housing model. The extent of the impact of the self-help model is not well reported. To close this gap, this article reports on a study expedited to assess whether the self-help housing model could be revitalised to curb the proliferation of informal settlements, especially in the central region of South Africa. The qualitative research aimed to suggest strategies to increase the use of the self-help housing model in the region. The qualitative (textual) data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions before they were subjected to thematic analysis. The study revealed that challenges encumber the self-help model of housing delivery, although the beneficiaries prefer it because of their involvement in the projects, which leads to bigger units and user satisfaction. The study concludes that the self-help housing policy used in South Africa requires revision to increase the scale of implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on self-building suggests classic state-socialism restricted the practice and it expanded only during the disintegration of the regime. The current article challenges this, to date empirically little supported, statement by estimating the extent of the practice in Hungary between 1921 and 2013 with the help of historical sources on housing construction and housing statistics. Contradicting earlier assumptions, data suggest self-build remained relatively stable throughout the twentieth century, was affected positively rather than negatively by the introduction of state-socialism, but there is no evidence of its substantial expansion during the disintegration process. The comparison of Hungarian data with evidence from countries across the world indicates that based on the time of the decline of the practice, a division among countries can be identified by the three tiers of the world-economy defined by Wallerstein: the core, the semiperiphery and the periphery. Hungary seems to have followed the semiperipheral course of development regardless of its state-socialist past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-help housing has been proposed as a solution to provide qualitatively adequate and affordable housing not only nowadays, but also during the late state socialism in the 1970s and 1980s in the former Czechoslovakia. In this article, we focus on how the self-help housing provision was during that era linked with the responsibilisation of households, a technique of governance usually associated with neoliberal regimes. On the case of self-help housing construction in town Myjava, which was supported by local authorities and initiated by local company eager to attract workers, we show then eventually main burden for management and risks steaming from the construction was carried by the individuals and their (extended) families. Seemingly the ideological contradiction of this individualistic solution was resolved through rigorous standardization of construction projects, which enabled to maintain a self-help housing as one of the regime’s tools for solving the housing question. We argue that in this respect, in the shift of responsibility from the formal institutions to the individuals, the housing system displays continuity between the late socialist and capitalist regimes, thus contributing to emerging body of literature which problematise the strict dichotomy between the socialist and capitalist eras.

Self-help housing has been proposed as a solution to provide qualitatively adequate and affordable housing not only nowadays, but also during the late state socialism in the 1970s and 1980s in the former Czechoslovakia. In this article, we focus on how the self-help housing provision was during that era linked with the responsibilisation of households, a technique of governance usually associated with neoliberal regimes. On the case of self-help housing construction in town Myjava, which was supported by local authorities and initiated by local company eager to attract workers, we show then eventually main burden for management and risks steaming from the construction was carried by the individuals and their (extended) families. Seemingly the ideological contradiction of this individualistic solution was resolved through rigorous standardization of construction projects, which enabled to maintain a self-help housing as one of the regime's tools for solving the housing question. We argue that in this respect, in the shift of responsibility from the formal institutions to the individuals, the housing system displays continuity between the late socialist and capitalist regimes, thus contributing to emerging body of literature which problematise the strict dichotomy between the socialist and capitalist eras. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), thousands of East Germans lived in flats occupied without state permission. What factors enabled and what practices shaped both the emergence and the persistence of informal housing in an East European dictatorship? The socialist authorities did not tolerate informality but contrary to the totalitarian rhetoric of state and party officials, local bureaucrats endeavoured to transform the grey zone of unauthorised housing dubbed 'Schwarzwohnen' into black (illegal) or white (legal). The high frequency of legalisation highlights the relative autonomy of these 'social gatekeepers'. A partial identity of interests between informal occupiers of flats (Schwarzwohner) and the state led to the blurring of boundaries between formal and informal practices. A substantial proportion of Schwarzwohner, however, had little or no contact with authorities, which is indicative of a partly dysfunctional dictatorship. At the same time, Schwarzwohnen developed several unique features different from the squatting of buildings in the Global North-West and from informal settlements in the Global South, most notably a far-reaching compliance with the law which sometimes included unsolicited rent payments. In addition, Schwarzwohner used specific tactics to achieve legalisation such as 'consentful contention'. The effect of the informality was ambiguous as it undermined the state's authority but alleviated the housing shortage and thus (unintentionally) stabilised the state at the same time. Schwarzwohnen vanished with the GDR but has been partly revitalised by the 'Guardian House' scheme in several East German cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the relationship between self-build housing and the wider planning and housing regime. Although there is growing policy and academic attention to self-build housing, there is a lack of understanding of the institutional and regulatory conditions shaping the prospects of such housing provision. This paper takes the case of The Netherlands and scrutinizes how institutional dynamics over time have made lower and middle residents dependent on densely organized consortia of municipalities, housing associations and developers. These norms of land development appear to be at odds with the logic of self-building. Through exploring evidence in a pilot study of a municipal self-building scheme in Almere, the authors suggest that making self-building the cornerstone of a resident-led land development strategy, also for low- and middle-incomes, implies a reconfiguration of the actors’ positions in housing provision. This entails a commissioning role for residents in the institutional domain of social and commercial developers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many European countries are experiencing a recent (re)emergence of collaborative housing, such as co-housing, housing co-operatives and other forms of collective self-organised housing. One of the less studied aspects of these housing forms is the relationship between users (i.e. residents) and institutional actors and, in particular, established housing providers. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that helps expand the knowledge on the nature of these collaboration practices. To this end, different concepts and theories are reviewed, with a focus on collaboration and co-production as useful constructs to understand these phenomena. The proposed framework is applied to two examples of collaboration for housing co-production between residents’ groups and established housing providers in Vienna and Lyon, respectively. We found a high degree of user involvement throughout each project. In both cases, the group of residents that initiated the project partnered-up with established housing providers, who facilitated access to key resources and professional expertise. We hypothesise that housing providers with an ethos akin to initiators' values will more likely become (and stay) involved in collaborative housing, as compared to mainstream providers. We conclude with a reflection on possible improvements to our analytical framework and directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Nicaragua almost half of the population lives in substandard housing conditions. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper examines three housing projects constructed in the same rural community between 1997 and 2010. These case studies illustrate how global trends in international development influence the implementation of local development initiatives. In the case of housing, this is seen in the shift from programs that train individuals in construction skills to build their own homes, to an emphasis on providing credit to finance the construction or improvement of a house. This transition, from a focus on empowerment though training to the right to credit, reflects broader shifts and trends within international development. Acknowledging the increasing role of credit in housing programs, four additional strategies are outlined to help governments meet the housing needs of their citizens: flexibility in housing plans and strategies, state level government support, local government participation and comprehensive partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though previous studies have examined how formalising land tenure affects housing improvements in informal settlements, the role of tenure security and its long-term influence remain unclear. In response, this paper quantitatively examines the extent to which formalising land tenure by way of slum declaration has stimulated housing improvements during the last three decades in the slums of Pune, India. Since slum declaration guarantees residents occupancy but not full property rights, this study focuses on how tenure security contributes to housing outcomes, such as materials, size, the number of floors and the amount of money spent for the improvements. Using original household survey data, analysis involving propensity score matching and difference-in-differences methods reveals that slum declaration has tripled a household’s likelihood of having added a second floor and, albeit less clear, increased the average amount of money spent on housing improvements. At the same time, slum declaration has not induced any improvement in housing materials, largely since many residents of non-formalised slums have also replaced materials. These results indicate that slum declaration, even in the long run, has continued to influence housing investments in Pune’s slums, in terms of both type and amount spent, though residents of non-formalised slums have also come to enjoy certain de facto tenure security. Among other implications for policy, these findings underscore that governments should at least provide legal assurance of occupancy rights in informal settlements, even if active interventions such as slum upgrading and titling are currently difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group-build housing developments can bring together the cost and customisation benefits regularly attributed to self-build housing with a communitarian ethos associated with ‘intentional’ communities. This paper presents an initial examination of the rationale, motivations and social experiences of group-build housing from Germany, where over half of all new homes are produced independently from volume-build developers. The paper aims, firstly, to test the hypothesis that group-build delivers general ‘community’ benefits; secondly, to contribute to an understanding of the processes leading to successful schemes; and lastly, to demonstrate that by making individual home building dependent on the success of a larger group, collective interests can prevail over personal pursuit. This research draws attention to the motivations, the social experiences through the development process and the social legacy – aspects of particular interest for policy-makers as well as prospective builders – of group-build housing projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite regulatory efforts in Texas aimed at preventing the spread of “colonias”—self-help settlements with inadequate water and wastewater infrastructure—since the early 1990s hundreds of new self-help “model subdivisions” have formed throughout the state. Using aerial photography and parcel-level property records, I provide the first systematic analysis of these subdivisions. Their proliferation poses considerable challenges for local planners, and although most model subdivisions appear to have basic infrastructure, housing conditions are exceedingly poor because of the protracted nature of the self-help process. The study highlights the need for renewed attention by scholars, policymakers, and planners toward self-help settlements in Texas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarship on informal housing focuses on developing countries and little research investigates how low-income populations in the US participate in homeownership through self-built and self-provided housing. Meanwhile, informally developed areas are increasingly being uncovered in the US, especially in the urban periphery of growing metropolitan regions. This paper documents and analyses largely unknown housing conditions and needs for the growing number of people that live in such communities. Data for this paper were collected through a survey of 133 households in two unincorporated low-income, self-help settlements in Central Texas. In this survey we address (1) household composition, (2) specific housing conditions, and (3) reported structural and infrastructural problems. Through regression analyses we identify factors that mitigate or aggravate the severity of overall housing problems and identify the most significant concerns for residents. Our results offer future lines of action regarding property titles, financing and dwelling upgrading. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The recent trend to develop rural land in western China has resulted in the large-scale relocation of villagers. It has also given rise to self-help development of housing. By examining long-established research on both formal urban development and informal village settlements, this study examines self-built housing, collective-endorsed housing and urban relocation housing in one western Chinese village. Their coexistence was made possible by ambiguities in property rights. The state–collective divide and the urban–rural dichotomy in property rights were restructured in land development, and villagers were able to use various means to take advantage of transitional, favourable deals to gain short- or long-term returns. Specifically, self-developed housing met market demands and traditional lifestyles, but witnessed a gap between de jure and de facto property rights and could not be easily formalised, whereas officially sanctioned relocation provided long-term homeownership but with ambiguous de jure property rights and failed to fully integrate villagers into urban neighbourhoods. To a lesser extent, collective endorsement added to the legitimacy of self-help development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: This paper analyzes past and present efforts of government agencies, civil society organizations and the private sector to improve the housing conditions of some one million urban poor who live in informal settlements in Bangkok, Thailand. It gives special attention to the current programme, Baan Mankong that supports community-based organizations in informal settlements to build city-wide networks that enable the communities to negotiate better deals with landowners for the lease or purchase of land, and to assist in the improvement of housing and infrastructure. It finds that the programme, while effective, also has some limitations and concludes that Thailand needs a national housing policy that promotes adequate housing for all. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The housing dimension in Kolkata has been changing in recent years. Since 1991, the city has initiated housing reform that has taken many forms and manifestations characterized by the reduction in social allocation, cutbacks in public funding and promotion of a real estate culture in close partnership between the state and private actors. There has been increasing concern about the housing condition of the poor in the deserted slums and bustee settlements amidst the evident ‘poor blindness’ in housing and investment policies. Against this background the paper discusses self-help housing in Kolkata. It seeks to answer a simple question – why the concept of self-help has not been recognised as a viable policy option for a city with widespread slums and bustee settlements by visiting the complex urban context of Kolkata set within the city''s politics, poverty and policies. The paper concludes that there is a need to recognise the existing structural duality in the city and support self-help housing as a parallel housing approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Environment & Urbanization is the property of Sage Publications Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: This paper develops a methodology for integrating remote sensing/aerial photographs and GIS techniques to identify low-income informal homestead subdivisions (IFHS, also known as colonias) in peri-urban areas of US metropolitan areas. Unlike their self-build counterparts in Latin American cities which start as illegal occupations of totally un-serviced lots, in the USA housing production is largely self-managed (embracing trailer homes, manufactured homes, modular units with self-help home improvement, etc.), placed on legally developed lots, albeit poorly or minimally serviced. As researchers begin to understand the logic and rationale underpinning their existence, and better appreciate where (spatially), and what (physical) “footprints” to look for, it becomes possible to identify and quantify the full extent of these peri-urban settlement phenomena. This paper reports on a three Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the USA to demonstrate the methodology and argues that this has wider application both in the USA and elsewhere. Specifically for the US, the paper outlines some of the policy implications that arise from using integrated techniques to develop an inventory of IFHS and from a deepening of public recognition of the phenomenon. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The purpose of this essay is to identify gender contracts in self-help housing construction. Gender contracts have been defined as invisible power relationships that determine roles, responsibilities, privileges, status, sexuality and behaviour of men and women within households, communities, the market and the state. Gender contracts shape social, economic, political and sexual relationships in what people often refer to as ‘our culture’. Various gender contracts constitute a gender system (e.g. patriarchy or matriarchy) under which general rules, perceptions, hierarchies and privileges are formulated, refined and preserved.The paper notes that although the advent of colonialism and capitalism did not replace patriarchal structures in Botswana, they set in new political and production systems that upset the traditional power base and provided opportunities for women to challenge traditional gender contracts—notably the marriage contract that had hitherto been used to oppress women. The paper further notes that despite women having made inroads into male domains, there has surfaced new sites and forms of female subordination largely due to gendered inequalities in accessing and controlling contemporary critical resources (land, money, modern technical skills and formal employment) as well as continued male dominance of community and state structures.Taking Lobatse as a case study, the paper tries to identify gender contracts formed as a result of men''s takeover of construction activities which were traditionally undertaken by women in Botswana. It notes that besides dominating construction work, men control access to land, building skills, housing finance, and the entire self-help housing process in Lobatse, thereby forcing women into subordinate positions from which they have to bargain or negotiate new gender contracts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In terms of welfare, development, and overall distributional impact, the study of whole sector housing development is more significant than attention to parts of a housing system. Housing policy development is increasingly taking the more comprehensive approach. The first phases of international housing policy, 1972-83, represented in sites and services (and related in situ slum upgrading) projects, could never become completely effective. These approaches had only fragmentary relationships to general land policies, to the development of housing finance systems, and to the broader economic, social and institutional conditions for enhancing the qualities and supplies of housing. In due time the theoretical and practical limitations became apparent and various international aid agencies, including the World Bank, adopted broader, more sophisticated thinking in housing, leading to a quest for whole sector housing development. But in the late 1990s, within managerial reforms in the World Bank, the specialist housing section was disbanded and the staff dispersed to other sections. This paper provides an historical explanation for the change, along with critical commentaries on the potential dilemmas with the modern, more comprehensive approaches. It is argued that policy and research agendas should be more evidently based upon understanding of the developmental dialectic between the economic, the social and the political. The developmental welfare of such a dialectic has authority and legitimacy from several Nobel prize winners in the 1990s. This paper reflects upon the relevance of their theoretical contributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT This paper aims to contribute to the discussion of the nature of the self-help housing market by analysing its extent and mode of operation in four self-help settlements in the intermediate sized city of Pereira, Colombia. The evidence from the survey settlements suggests that the market for self-help houses is small. Self-help settlements are dominated by a land market rather than by a housing market, although the distinction between the two is far from clear cut. Few self-help houses enter the property market because: many self-help households have no intention of selling their house after all the hard work that went into building it; it is difficult for households who wish to purchase dwellings in self-help settlements to raise the necessary finance; and the lack of title deeds is probably also a limiting factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new convention of 'self-help housing' has become established over the past 20 years. However, a close examination of the literature shows that this approach is not widely implemented, but remains largely at the level of showcase projects; moreover the lowest income groups are usually not the principal beneficiaries of sites-and-service schemes. The literature gives evidence of powerful political, administrative and economic interests against the large-scale legal delivery of sites-and-services, and in favour of the continued dependence of the poor on illegal access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, then, has two primary objectives. One is to provide a measure of the extent of the net improvement in housing quality. Data from a slum upgrading project of the largest squatter community in Manila—the Tondo Foreshore—will be used in a hedonic price approach to measure changes in quality. This data base is singularly appropriate for this study because it contains panel (before and after) information on both housing and household characteristics, including a measure of value before the project. The data base and the estimation will be discussed in sections II and III. The other objective of this paper is to attempt to provide an explanation for housing improvement. While there is considerable evidence that security of tenure affects whether or not households make an improvement (Burns and Shoup 1981), it is also apparent that, given a certain tenure status, there is a great deal of variation in the amount of upgrading being carried out across households. A simple conceptual framework that takes into account the consumption and investment motive of housing demand is applied to the same data base to attempt to explain the source of this variation. This discussion will constitute section IV. The paper concludes with a summary and some policy implications in section V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the meanings and uses of self-help housing practices by focusing on two quite distinct cases--the reform movement for tenant self-management in New York City and the "rehab-squatters movement" in West Berlin. In New York tenant self-management has been incorporated into the current repertoire of municipal housing programs to a degree unimaginable a decade ago, affecting the lives of several thousand poor tenants. Self help activities focused not merely on housing, but addressing virtually every facet of everyday life, have arisen in the past decade or so on the basis of, and against, an increasingly crisis-ridden system of the material and reproduction of labor power, i.e. the reproduction of labor power organized by the capitalist state. The centrality of the state in this process is not coincidental, although it is contradictory. Rather, the state has been the key institutional means by which the relationship between labor and capital was restructured during the years of the depression, the Second World War and the immediate postwar period.

Self-help Housing in the United States has taken many forms. But probably the most popular form of self-help housing is the "shell" or incomplete but habitable house. Builders specializing in this type of housing include a few dominant construction companies operating in a regional, interstate market. The economics of self-help housing seems to recommend the means of increasing the housing stock-at least in low-income, rural areas. Ideally, a prospect buys a house "package" unfinished to a stage within his ability (and willingness) to complete construction. The saving in cost depends on the amount of owner-labor contributed to the enterprise. The study suggests that higher risks were compensated by higher than normal financial charges and interest rates. In effect, the more solvent buyers, to an unusual degree, apparently subsidized poor credit risks among buyers of incomplete but habitable houses. The contractor-builder who normally assigns the mortgage to a financial intermediary assumes virtually no control over the quality of owner construction.

Provides information on several research proposals from the Institute for Housing Studies that are being processes by the Netherlands Ministry for Development Co-operation as of April 1989. Potential of prefabrication for self-help and mutual aid housing; Provision of evolutionary infrastructure for low income settlements; Operation and management aspects of sanitation systems in low income shelter areas.