Broken Cities. Deborah Potts

       Foreword

      In 1978, shortly before the era of neoliberal capitalism was imposed on urban societies across much of the world, I began researching urban processes and livelihoods in southern Africa. Over the decades I researched and taught about urban livelihoods, low-income housing, the changing characteristics of migrant households and of migration patterns both to and from cities, and the role and nature of so-called informality in employment and housing. In particular, I spent much time and conducted major surveys in low-income neighbourhoods in Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. Along with the surrounding countries of Malawi, Zambia and South Africa, almost every type of low-income housing policy in fashion for the cities of the Global South from the late 1970s to today were practised with varying results. Most were promoted as ‘affordable’; very few were. Zimbabwe and South Africa were both ruled by white minorities when I began my academic career. This meant that they also had, most unusually for sub-Saharan Africa, significant provision of public rental housing that was affordable in so-called ‘townships’, although its main original purpose was for political control of migration and black African urban residents.

      In the UK, I live in the borough of Haringey in north-east London. I moved there in the late 1970s at a time when the issue of housing affordability per se in the UK had largely been solved by the cumulative outcomes of state intervention over many decades, but particularly since the end of the Second World War. The ward in which I live is culturally diverse and constantly changing. Haringey has some very wealthy residential areas, some much poorer areas, and everything in between – a comprehensive range of the various private- and public-sector housing types to be found in London outside the city’s central (and ludicrously expensive) areas. As with many of London’s residential boroughs beyond its historic centre, Haringey’s phases of rapid development in the late nineteenth century, from a peri-urban mix of land uses, including agriculture, to a densely built urban housing environment, followed the geography of the new underground railway lines. I have rented in the private sector in Haringey (and elsewhere in London), experiencing the usual range of eccentric and sometimes venal landlords, dangerous exploding water heaters and bizarre fungi and moulds that renters may encounter in that sector in the UK, albeit at a time when the rents were affordable. In the early 1980s, just as the first round of massive upswings in London house prices began, I bought a dilapidated terraced house. This had been divided into five bedsits by the previous owner and did not comply with most of the statutory housing standards. Today, it is worth a fortune because of subsequent rounds of surges in house prices in the UK’s cities, and particularly in London. It is utterly unaffordable to the sorts of households who were buying in the area in the 1980s. Their typical employment and related income profiles, and reliance entirely on mortgages and 10% cash deposits, would not buy a house in Haringey today.

      Over the decades, my lived experience in north London and various cities in southern Africa, alongside my research and teaching on housing, increasingly led me to see the issues underlying housing outcomes and the issue of affordability in these areas, and elsewhere in the urban world, in terms of their structural similarities rather than their differences, albeit always shaped by specific local histories and politics. The crisis of housing affordability across the world’s major cities has also deepened and become more embedded. These are the issues that led to this book. In the following chapters examples are drawn from across the world but particularly from southern Africa and from London. A deliberate effort is

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