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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]

Securing property rights in both rural landholdings and urban housing is a much-debated feature of current development policy. Providing title for the household does not guarantee security for women, and legal equality may fail to prevent gender differences in property ownership. A pro-active approach to women's property rights is needed. Disenchantment with state programs delivering individual titles has led to calls for alternative strategies emphasizing local or customary authorities and procedures. This paper questions the ability of either approach to address gender inequalities effectively without affirmative action but suggests that informal responses within state institutions can help. Key words--gender, urban property, formalization, Latin America, Mexico

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.

This paper explores the validity of the statement that one-third of the world's households are headed by women. It examines the implications of using economic criteria to define household headship and of recent interest in woman-maintained households and concealed woman-headed households. There is a danger of underplaying the diversity of woman-headed households and of marginalizing older women by identifying woman-headed households with single mothers of dependent children. Ultimately, too narrow a focus on particular household types undermines our ability to further a truly gendered analysis of the household in development research and practice.

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]

In Mexican cities, somewhere between one-third and one-half of all households rent or share accommodation. Over the years, even though rental housing has been in relative decline, the absolute numbers of tenant households have been increasing. Recently, because home ownership has become increasingly expensive, the Mexican state has been anxious to expand the stock of rental housing. However, its policies do not seem to be directed towards the majority of landlords, in part, at least, because the nature of the landlordism is not well understood. This paper examines the main features of landlords and landlordism in two major cities of Mexico, Guadalajara and Puebla. Based on surveys with tenants and landlords, it examines how landlords obtained their property, why they began to rent it, their socio-economic characteristics, their perceptions of the business of renting, and the mechanics of setting rent levels and selecting tenants.

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]

On the Line is a thorough and moving piece of investigative reporting by Canadian journalist Augusta Dwyer. It is difficult to imagine how even those readers without a particular existing [...]